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As surreal said, if messages just disappeared from threads it would likely cause confusion and interupt the continuity of the thread. Members do have the ability to edit their own messages, but they cannot entirely remove all evidence that they've participated in the thread. This way, at least everyone else that reads the thread and can see the original and "last edited" times for retracted or edited comments.
Allowing the author to delete their own threads would also be a bad idea because in doing so, the author would have the ability to delete all the comments and information contained in the thread by other members. Deleting threads also subtracts from the overall post count of every member that replied to the thread.
Even the mods seldom delete individual messages from within a thread, and it's very rare that an entire thread is deleted unless it's a duplicate post or spam. When a thread does need to be removed from the public forums, it's usually moved to a private forum .... not actually deleted.
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