What happened was this, I think. Cellarites found it and worked the puzzle for a while. Then they got tired of it and dropped it. Five weeks after the thread died, somebody who was working on it came in and posted a post with everything s/he had come up with to that point.
The next day, the googlebots found it. And because the Cellar had a decent ranking before, suddenly people googling for TINP found the Cellar's post of solutions, and from that point other people googling came and started solving it together here.
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