Perhaps the standards are softening more and more because the forum has less and less active users and each is starting to be important from the perspective of the administration, especially if it is not a newbie which can be nuked very easily if he did something wrong. I don't know how else to explain that someone has hundreds of posts deleted by a moderator and still not permabanned - it has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

Perhaps the simplest thing would be to disable signatures in the Press board, and this is not something that would require major technical intervention by admin. Our main spammer in that board would probably give up right away if that happened.