I get a ton of spam from my contact me pages even with a captcha in place, i've been experimenting with loading an initial dummy form and replacing it within a few seconds of loading to the real deal which seems to have cut down on bots submitting stuff.

Rate limit everything you can and use a captcha where acceptable, there are also a load of public IP and email blacklists that you can use to run a quick check. Working in a field where there is a large amount of bots and incentive to abuse we invest quite a bit of time and money in fraudulent traffic detection using a cornocopia of different services in tangent and at the end of the day we still see a small percentage of traffic getting through that is fantastically human like.

With that out of the way, I've been engulfed in AI and GPT3 functionality lately and I thought this post was going to be doomsaying the coming apocalypse of bot spam, because the level of human like quality coming from the AI is going (already has) to make deciphering human vs bot traffic/posts/emails/comments nearly impossible. It will be fun here soon when we see forums entirely dedicated to bots conversing and arguing with each other outside of reddit.