It looks like more and more we are facing a losing battle and may possibly need to switch tactics. 

You are in no way shape or form going to stop the influx of 3rd world posters attempting to provide for their family.  Your fighting human nature.  I also strongly feel as the market turns back around the spam is going to increase dramatically as more and more people become aware of the opportunity.  All the gains that I see posted on the reduction of spam could simply be due to the horrible market and inability to earn much doing bounties at this point.  As we march back to a trillion dollar market cap I predict this problem will become worse. 

I think the steps taken so far have been great (specially the 1 merit for jr member).  I would like to see that bumped to 3 but if merit is selling for around $10 a pop I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference between 1 and 3. 

I believe we now must fight the spam on the ICO level which means that you cannot have a signature bounty on this forum requiring 15 posts per week.  If a rule was made to perhaps a max of 5 post allowed per week per signature bounty you would reduce spam massively with that one move.  A few hundred projects are much easier to monitor than 100's of thousands of user accounts.  We have tons of spam warriors here.  Lets unleash them on a battle that is winnable.  Against the projects which are paying people to spam.  We have a situation where projects are coming to the forum and paying people to spam (15 posts per week) and we are going after the people and not the projects.  This does not make sense to me. 

The mass shit poster has nothing to lose by continuing.  It will cost him 10 bucks to buy the merit he needs per account to continue his ways.  At most he loses 10 bucks.  Now imagine the ICO who is looking to rake in millions.  Do you think they are going to break forum rules in the first place by requiring mass posting to receive a signature bounty?  of course not.  If they try it the spam warriors will take it down and win a huge victory against spam.

I feel we either kill the signatures or put the pressure on the projects not the newbies (aside from what has been put in place so far).  There are billions of potential spammer but only a few hundred projects at a given time.

Lets make a battle we can win.   The hungry will always find a way.  Hungry people cause revolutions and change history.  Fighting them over spam is not going to work.  Go after the guys who have money already.  The ICO projects.