Thats brilliant to use Selenium RC for the scripted deletions. Selenium is incredibly flexible and easy to script, though not very fast which is probably why they have such a backlog. Also because it is all coming from a legitimate browser it would be very difficult for the sites to block, though I suppose they could just block the ip of the server.
I've used Selenium for automated webapp testing. Some people don't like it, but I've found it a good fit for the abilities and preferences of my testing team. Having scripts runnable in a Firefox plugin as they are developed, and then also from a command line server to do mass unit tests, makes for a pretty flexible testing setup. You can test against multiple browsers including IE.
The major complaint people have is usually against the command arg1 arg2 grid for the scripts, but here's the thing about programming in a table: you can get your testers to do it without freaking out like "I can't learn how to program, I am bad with computer languages". The command table gives them exactly what they need--a way to repeatedly run a series of actions in a web browser--without making them learn anything more.
