The other post incorrectly had "2010" in the title and I made a comment about how this should be corrected. The "2010" was then removed.
If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.
What do you mean by borked? Did it actually cause damage somehow or did it just not run well? I wouldn't expect something so resource intensive to work well on that computer just as I would be amazed if you could smoothly run mountain lion on an 8 year old mac. It's actually a major strength of linux that you can run modern software versions on even extremely outdated hardware; you just need to choose an appropriate desktop environment.
If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.