I'm trying to visualize a life of bitmasks without bitwise operators. I just had to disable bit 1 on a bunch of rows, and then later reenable bit 1. How would you propose doing this without bitwise operators? With them, it was a snap.

If you would suggest changing the schema, that doesn't work for me. I'm dealing with an off the shelf forum application that would be a ton of work to change the database schema for.