This is fair (albeit somewhat of an exaggeration - CRs message board is spammed less than many), but all CR needs to do as part of the sign up process is say that you can't have a signature immediately, but you can in future. This would save many of us "serious" members who have just signed up wasting time trying to work out how to do it.
I can't abide the spammers ruining the forum, but also as a new user would find it helpful if some of these nuances were a little clearer.
Good idea about the notice:
I'll add a sticky post, as the original one post about this has long ago dropped off the top of the list.
Having had to work with other moderators to remove thousands of signature spams - it took us weeks, I can assure you that its not a exaggeration.. The new system has so far been working to keep them away, their robots signup by the thousands, but are not able to post spam in signatures.
The signature links are not visable unless you look at the profile for each user. There are no tools to do this, its grunt labor by multiple people who spent many long hours.