This smells suspicious to me. Cash vs. physical settlement is part of the contract specification ... it's not a flag on an order you send to the exchange.
For anyone who wants to do some detective work and track down whether this really happened: there's only two places I'm aware of which trade physically-settled coal futures, NYMEX (QL) and ASX (YCX/YCY/YCZ). I'm 90% sure this post is talking about the NYMEX one --- the author mentioned some XML hiccups, and NYMEX moved to XML for settlement messages back in 2003, whereas ASX still uses some custom message format.
For anyone who wants to do some detective work and track down whether this really happened: there's only two places I'm aware of which trade physically-settled coal futures, NYMEX (QL) and ASX (YCX/YCY/YCZ). I'm 90% sure this post is talking about the NYMEX one --- the author mentioned some XML hiccups, and NYMEX moved to XML for settlement messages back in 2003, whereas ASX still uses some custom message format.