I'm merely offering a helping hand to those who are stuck with pesky server/cloud/traffic/scale issues.
My email is in my profile. Hit me up!
Cheers
How can we deal with brute force scripts run against marketing forms, or login forms? WAF?
Besides a Captcha field, fail2ban is popular and depending on the (un)popularity of your forum software, it might need further customization. Distributed (IP wise) brute forcing can be challenging especially when dealing with one bot with a large set of IPs. But it's usually effective.