As someone who as a mod on a different forum before the bots were as much of a thing, I can't imagine what it's like to deal with that today. On the other hand, the forum I was on eventually died even though it had a name as closely tied to its sport as bikeforums.net (though the sport didn't have quite the potential audience size). At the end, it was just like 4 of us chatting around a campfire as the lights went off. I get the desire to get rid of spam, but I also get the fear of the main audience of C&V aging out and not being replaced (though hopefully that will take a while).