I agree with one merit to become Junior but we should also remove Junior's signatures. Requiring ten merit to become a Member and get a sig would really sort the wheat from the chaff here. Far too easy to beg, buy or trade one merit and this will become rife. Ten is a much different ball game and becomes exponentially more difficult the more accounts you have.
I agree that Juniors should also be prohibited from using signatures and personal texts. And I`m sure theymos also understands this. But I guess he didn`t want to establish such drastic changes all at once, as this could "scare off" users of lower ranks and have a bad effect on traffic. Theymos gives Juniors a chance to improve the quality of their posts. Establishing new rules for Newbies is a kind of warning for Juniors. If they correctly understand it, the need to establish more stringent rules in order to become a member, will disappear. And if spam from Juniors still continues, theymos will always have time to introduce new restrictions.
I dunno. Requiring one or even ten merit is hardly drastic, but it probably would have been better doing it now at the same time rather than at some other point down the line. I think it would be better to make certain changes all together rather than having to deal with fresh amounts of complaints every time we change something minor. This is a small baby-step in the right direction but we've still got a long way to go before we make this forum fit for purpose. I don't think any amount of changes here other than the outright removal of signatures will scare people off either. Children will throw their tantrums for a few days or weeks then get over it and deal with it because this forum is far too valuable to them so believe me when I say they're going nowhere, but they're certainly going to cry about it for a bit until they calm down.