Hmmm. I just came here trying to figure out why this didn’t happen. Seems this has been requested before, multiple times.
I’m just going to state my opinion that for the vast majority of use-cases and users’ expectations and understandings, this is a poor default. If the bump cause has been deleted, it is entirely reasonable to assume that the post will not be treated as bumped. As an admin, I expect this behavior. As a user, my assumption upon seeing content show up in latest, where the most recent activity is from months ago, is that there is a bug in the app. Not the end of the world, but shakes my confidence in the app’s ability to display the data I’m requesting. I already know it inserts things that aren’t supposed to be there, so it’s quite possibly also hiding things that it shouldn’t.
I’d be really interested to know if somebody can come up with another reasonable assumption the average user might make when seeing a topic at the top of “Latest” without any recent activity, other than “it’s a bug.”
I also have a related question. What happens if I whisper on a topic? Does it get bumped?