I don't expect old accounts to ever lose their "perks". Reducing "grandfathered" Merit has been suggested many times before. Losing 1 Merit per year would be enough to downgrade many old accounts. Or 1 Merit per 100 Activity, or 100 Posts. But none of this would stop the spammers: they'll just buy/use a higher ranked account and continue shitposting with one rank less. A current Legendary would take forever to lose enough rank to reduce signature value. Or they'll buy a few Merits somewhere.
I was thinking more to something like some percent, to not take forever.
And maybe I live in a dream world, by buying merits is not so wide spread (as buying accounts) and risky (or riskier) too. And if it's risky and expensive it may not worth the price (one can hope...)
The only way to get rid of their spam, is reporting their posts. But to do that, I'd have to actually read it first, and I can't get myself to do that. So I've given up on reporting them, whenever I see a user with that scam-casino's signature, I click
Ignore. On the Gambling board, many topics now have many Ignored users posting in a row. That makes the whole place quite useless.
Reporting does help, but I feel that it's an underused feature.
Ignoring them helps them; the shitposts don't get reported, the signatures get spammed, the newbies get scammed. You know the drill...