I can see how reallocating the message IDs presents problems for scraping forum posts. Good luck with dealing with that mess.
Luckily, it's not something that happens that often. In whole of Bitcointalk's history, I would be surprised if more than 10 people asked the administration to add a new post in their threads. Maybe those numbers will increase following this discussion. LoyceV's scrapper picks up only new posts. It doesn't register changes made to already existing posts. That's also why if you mentioned a user's name in an edited post, that user wouldn't be notified of the mention even if he is using LoyceV's bot.
Globals can't do it, but I suppose you could maybe get around it with some trickery by splitting the threads and then merging them with another you created. Probably much easier to get an admin to do it though
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But that would also require the assistance of admins and global mods. Ordinary users can't merge two threads, can they
How would that merging go exactly? If I have a thread where there has been 20 replies and I create a new thread to merge it with my first two posts, what goes where exactly? Can the forum staff merge it in a way that the OP of my new thread becomes the 3rd post in my old thread? Please explain the process a bit?