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.
Where can I find the stats on the number of active users? The stats on
https://ninjastic.space regarding the number of posts per month show that we are significantly higher than we were a year ago. Still, if good users are leaving or not signing up to the forum because of the spam issue, then giving spammers free reign to spam isn't exactly going to help the issue.
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.
I've said this before, but this is not a solution. Many of the spammer accounts in the Press board are owned, operated, employed or paid by various crypto "news" sites such as CoinIdol or CoinTelegraph. As long as they can get their links in to each post, then they don't care about having a signature.
IDK if merit source visit that board. I would like to suggest they do not waste their valuable time there. I believe they cannot find a post for merit.
I am a merit source. I visit the board not infrequently. Any merit I award is invariably to a thoughtful reply, and never to one of these topic spammers.