Well that's obviously the source of the issue here and removing signatures is pretty much the only way to stop this nonsense immediately. I often wonder if signature campaigns will ever be removed here. Theymos has mentioned it would be a last resort and one he'd be willing to do if it came to it, but it would kill of most of the activity/traffic here (not that I'm saying that's a bad thing). I'd love to see the data and charts in the drop of actual traffic and how many people would instantly leave if it does ever actually happen. It'd probably just go back to the sort of numbers we had pre-2013. Maybe much less. I suspect signature campaigns are the only thing even keeping a lot of the 'old timers' here (though there are still a lot who admirably never joined campaigns for whatever reason). I think there are a couple of other things we could do before it ever got to completely removing signatures though such as punishing badly run campaigns and maybe even removing signatures from all the lower ranks first rather than a blanket ban on everyone, but as long as you can get paid to post we're always going to have an issue with spam in one way or another, but I think we need to try find more ways of limiting it before the inevitable happens.