Now that I'm not posting from my phone, I'll get to this.
First thing's first: It was clearly a violation of the "no bumping old threads" rule, because the last post of the thread bumped was over a year old. You're not disputing this.
The only issue of contention here on your part is whether there was a justification for a bumping. Your discussion really had no reason why it needed to be attached to the year-old thread, as there wasn't any content in that thread which uniquely added to the content within your post for the discussion you were hoping to have. Furthermore, even if there was content that could have been added to the conversation via the old thread, that could have been solved by simply linking to the old thread. If anything, the only influence that can be seen is that your discussion may be unnoticed because it's buried within a preexisting thread, as opposed to existing on its own.
In short, at the point where there's an undisputed rules violation, is there a reason why the discussion needed to be within a year-old thread as opposed to being its own separate thread?
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