KingCobra the thing is, that a thread that has recieved so much attention can't be deleted "by mistake", as it already had >40.000 views and even if the moderator thought it was a spam thread, the number of views wouldn't equal the massive amount of views this thread had (or the moderator has checked it in the list of the threads he wanted to delete - but then it should ask again if the moderator wants to delete the selected threads...). So I can really feel Blue Whale's anger, in his position I would be also angry.
But if I am not mistaking there is a restoring-system in vBulletin (I think that's the board software this website is using), which actually saves the deleted posts (like comments, threads, etc.) in a text file after it removes it from the SQL database, so there are hopes the thread can still be found. What can I say... moderators, please be more careful in the future and first learn inside out the forum software (functions, etc.) - I don't want to offend you, you do your job really well, but it's just that nobody here (I guess) wants such an uncomfortable situation again.