I used to belong to a certain wine forum. Several years ago they started getting spammed from China with new accounts posting links to all kinds of stuff. Being on the east coast USA, I would see them early on and it became a daily task to delete the phony messages. I eventually tired of that because the admin didn't seem interested enough to address the problem. So I started my own wine forum and mine is by invitation only. I get no spammers. That was done in February 2018. Since then, my forum has done well well and I've even started a forum for our homeowners association (HOA) out here in Springfield, Virginia. That is also controlled by invitation only, where you need the email address of a person to send them the invitation.
That sort of control really cannot be implemented on a public forum though. We want new users to come but somehow the vetting process needs to be tightly controlled to avoid the spammers.
That old wine forum has since gone away. I'm glad I started mine in the world before COVID-19 struck, because it gave rise to many folks interested in our weekly events (usually Tuesday evenings). I'm not trying to advertise my wine forum here other than to point out that we don't have any issues with spammers.
As Albert Einstein said, "I could have done so much more with a Big Al's Computer!".
