I think this belongs in technical issues, not community, but I think I can take a stab at answering this one, Matt...

The "chat backdoor" was something that I setup on my website one time when FT's servers were going to be down for an entire weekend. Essentially, I copied the FT chat login screen to my site. The catch was, i did not have any way to check passwords, so you could log in as anyone (similar to when we have invited guests). Some people abused this system, so it was disabled when FT came back up. Furthermore, digichat now ONLY recognises logins orginating from *.flyertalk.com, so I could not set it back up even if I wanted to.

As for logging, I also know that chat is logged constantly (not sure about PMs). When we were having some problems with some members being offensive and using multiple 4-letter words, Randy was able to pull up a text log the next morning, and take action based on the exact words that were said. I assume that only Randy & his staff have access to this log.

I hope this clears up what you were asking about.