Regarding AI user accounts, can you expand on what “damage” it causes if the users never posts?
We made a change a month ago where we suppress profiles from low trust and anonymous users till a user actually posts, so the spam is hidden.
One interesting approach imo if the volume is really high would be to junk accounts after 30 days if they don’t post, they need to reveal themselves or they will be junked.
AI spam detection has been spectacularly successful on all the forums we enabled it, you can use it on your forum with some free models like gemini free tier. We give our customers access to our model, but this is not widely available to self hosters.