The huge number of up-votes is almost certainly that they were slowly added over the last 5 years by people who found it via Google long after it fell off the front page and voted up because it was what they Googled for. He only got a handful of up votes when it was first posted; and IIRC that was long enough ago that the current level of hostility to lower skill level questions wasn't nearly as strong here as it is today.

@tombull89 I agree that parts of MS's documentation would benefit from making finding equivalent information for other versions easier, but knowledge base articles on legacy software retain value until the last people stop using them.

@MarkHenderson maybe they closed that loophole at some point; I don't want to create a bogo edit on a real question just to test it.

I suspect most non-unicode aware users end up padding a few dead spaces at the end of the message. I know I've seen "and padding spaces to get 6 chars" edit comments more than once.

@MichaelHampton SO is in the process if removing the homework tag; for lower quality questions the process looks a lot like nuking from orbit. I suspect the close queue is being refilled significantly faster than normal. Assuming most of the 20k to 13k reduction over the last two months has been the destruction of negative scored questions, the drain rate will probably speed up significantly in the medium term future.