With the Captain's Log post I got a weird error twice (once trying to view the page the other trying to update it):
When I looked at the database structure I saw it's a mediumint so I updated it to be a bigint. I find it hard to believe this one topic has had this many views...
I think this is one of the only pages accessible to the greater internet without logging into the forums on an account, so I guess it's possible it's just been crawled a fuckton of times.
Either way my change made it so the max value went from 16777215 to 2^64-1 (I guess I COULD have made it be just a regular int which maxes out at 4294967295 but I don't want to have to deal with it again.
Hopefully this means anyone else who happens to be looking at the topic won't see an error (which went away after refresh, presumably phpBB has some way of just saying "yup, I threw an error but they really want to see the topic"