Btw out of interest, why do you never use the "Quote" Button? you just center previous text and bold it, personally it looks quite awkward but thats just a matter of opinion.
Finally finding about some of the bots that are flooding the users online - bytespider apparently is a huge offender here - ignores robots.txt and comes in from a ton of different IPs
Ghan has said he has fixed this. Monovertex please confirm this fix. This was only a problem with people that had signatures in the upper levels like not the special members but the respected members.