Closed: I am more than happy to explain what happened to the suspended users mentioned above. They all broke the forum rules numerous times and didn’t listen to warnings. Closing this thread as it has been derailed and no longer on topic. 
Discourse (the forums we use) allows every user to customize what threads show as bumped and even allows you to mute notifications from any thread that you choose, it sounds like this would be a great solution for the problem you are experiencing. For more info on how to customize Discourse to fit your needs feel free to check out the official Discourse faq forums here: https://meta.discourse.org/c/howto/faq