But this would also have negative consequences. It's true most of the spam comes from newer members and I wouldn't be against some of the lower ranks having their signatures removed completely, but then this just makes farming more lucrative and more people spamming to hit the desired rank and more threads in Meta asking why their activity isn't going up and when will they be a Hero member etc. It's seems to be swings and roundabouts whatever we do
I don't quite understand what you meant to say
I'm not in favor of completely removing signatures for lower ranks, which is what your reply seems to come down to. I talk about disabling signatures for new members and enabling them later on their personal request when they eventually get promoted to higher ranks. You seem to have taken my reply out of the context of the post I was replying to. It was about making a transition to managed signatures more smooth without wreaking havoc by disabling all signatures for all ranks altogether at the same time
That would indeed work at first, but the moderators would be overwhelmed by requests from accounts to enable signatures. You can see the number of 'why was I banned' threads on meta. They will be replaced by thousands of 'why was the request to enable signatures on my account rejected' threads.
So you think that reading tonnes of spam everyday is easier than reading instead a few messages from the same guys who are now posting all this crap? Further, moderators are not just reading all these posts, they are also banning shit posters (at first warning, then banning, then rinse, repeat). After that moderators start receiving angry messages from the banned members. Still gonna claim that moderators will be overwhelmed if signatures are disabled? As to me, they will have much less work to do...
Whether they are really interested in that is another question though