Oh dear. It seems my comment was interpreted as being a negative one.

*shrug* I was just presenting my interpretation of the situation. I didn't assume your comment was "negative" or not. Rereading what I wrote, I'm not sure where you read me taking your comment as negative, but that doesn't really matter. I'm not sure how you "took" my comment, but I apologize if it distressed you.

The pmsig CSS features could certainly use some improvement, but the princepawn/PodMaster incident has shown that it is already useful, even important. I don't think one can yet safely hide all signatures, but one can certainly manipulate the presentation of many individuals' signatures.

Some help text, some links to it, and a warning (with such a link) when someone previews a node having all (or nearly all?) of their node contents within the tags would probably go a long way toward making it possible to manipulate all signatures (and it is the most direct route I've heard toward that end).

For newly-created signatures (or those still without the tags added), the "cut-n-paste this as your new signature" would be handy, yes. One could probably even emit a form that allowed moving bits around and, when submitted, updates the signature without the need for cut-n-paste nor a trip to user settings, but I'm not sure on the details of that (unfortunately, some user settings-related code made some bad desicisions [that I hope to correct but haven't] about how to determine when a parameter is "empty" and so you can clean out lots of settings by sending a partial form to user settings) and I'm certainly not saying that such is "required" or worth the effort or even that it would be the best approach -- the devil is in the details and those are best dealt with by the author and applier.

Once such is in place, a one-time run to remove these CSS tags from old nodes where the tags surround the entire contents would be the next step. This could be done via the database (some Perl code run by one of the gods) or via editors' power and an external script (which is probably the better option since this method would also record the changes in the editors' change log).

I would appreciate anyone working on any of these changes. SiteDocClan should probably help write the explanatory text (they have standardized a style, etc.), at least eventually. Someone (sorry, I don't recall who) already wrote a script that scrapes nodes finding those that should be updated and I think more than one person has written external scripts to batch apply updates via editors' powers. So I don't think you need to do this alone.