-snip-
I'm guessing by "nuke", he's referring to what I described - i.e. deletion of all posts as well as the account.
Yes, mods have a nuke button. I would not want to delete posts that are related to scams though, so a bot is not an option.
A bot could selectively leave out posts in the scam accusations subforum. You do have a point that discussions outside of that forum which still pertain to scams would be deleted by a bot, since there would be no way of differentiating between those posts with others.
Everyone's posts are still saved as backups by the administrators
Hmm... You're right. Didn't realize that:
Yep, theymos can. He can see deleted posts and edits as well.
Yes, but only admins, not moderators. They can see all edits and deletions and all history.
If both sender and recipient of a PM deletes it, then it's deleted from the database completely and I can't access it except through the daily database backups. (This is a massive pain, so don't expect me to do it for you...)
Deleted/edited posts are always saved forever.
Surprised to see they even retain all edits. Seems like that would make the database excessively large.