Is it possible to activate soft forks such as BIP65 and BIP66 without prior signaling from miners? I noticed in chainparams.cpp that there are block heights where the enforcement begins.

I understand this is already active on bitcoin. I'm working on a project that is a clone of a clone of bitcoin, and we currently do not have BIP65 or BIP66 enforced - no signaling of these soft forks either (most of the network is on a source code fork of bitcoin 0.9). This project does not and never intends to attempt to replace bitcoin - we know that without bitcoin our project could never exist, so we owe a great deal of gratitude to the bitcoin developers.

If the entire network upgrades to the correct version of the software (based on bitcoin 0.15), which includes the block height that has enforcement, can we simply skip over the signaling and go straight into activation/enforcement?

At this time we are lucky that our network is very small, so it is reasonable to assume that the whole network will upgrade their clients within a short window (~2 weeks). We would schedule the activation ~2 months out from when the client is released, just to ensure everyone has time to upgrade.

We have been stuck on the 0.9 code branch and my goal is to bring it up to 0.15 at least, so that we can implement Segwit and other key features that bitcoin has introduced. The 0.15 client currently works with regards to sending and receiving transactions but the soft forks are not active. I understand that activating them will segregate the 0.15 clients onto their own fork, which is why I'd like to understand the repercussions of doing it without any signaling beforehand. I also would prefer not to have to make intermediate releases such as 0.10, 0.11.. etc to get the soft forks activated.

Another related question - does the block version get bumped up automatically at the time that a soft fork activates, or is there additional stuff that I need to do within the code to ensure it bumps up at the same time? From what I saw in the code it appears that it will bump up automatically, but I would like some confirmation on that.

Regards,

Samad