I’m not positive what combination prevents bots from being dumped in to databases. There may even be an exploit that makes using everything irrelevant. I don’t know. For right now, I am vigilant about checking our database looking for sudden large changes.
Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that their board is the cause of a problem and what that problem is?