I am just going to close the loop here.
Discourse are now hosting https://forum.freecodecamp.org/. The site is ultra snappy, spammer scripts are no longer causing even a blip. We remain somewhat unclear about what issue it had on digital ocean, there may have been a noisy neighbor, the machine may have been underpowered, there may have been machine gremlins, we are not sure. But the OP now is 100% resolved and the community is very happy.