@mark-coniglio I like Stop Forum Spam. Free is not always good, but in this case it is. Nothing will be a magic bullet. Layered onions, etc. Google is evil so I naturally prefer hCaptcha.
@gotwf pardon the late response, I've adopted your suggestion, thanks! 👍
@julian good to know! And apparently my spammers were all "human-powered"; ever since I made the changes suggested by @baris the blacklist hits and spam accounts have dropped to zero!
Hopefully it stays that way so I can focus on content 😇