I believe the one you are speaking of is Pyritie's Colorizer? I use it and it's good, and no you cannot shorten the gradient code, unless you want less variation, then place two letters in every color code instead of one.
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.