I run a mediawiki site. I got to play the cat and mouse game as well. For a while I was getting hundreds of spam page creations per day despite implementing as many defenses as I could. I was at least once a day going through and deleting the spam posts using the Smite Spam plugin. It's finally calmed down and I get one or two posts maybe every couple of weeks. I think I may have finally been removed from the site list of whatever "packaged" software the spammers use.
With prebuilt software, a small custom change required for creating content is often times enough to deter mass automated spam. My go to for a number of the years was to add a form field with the label "Enter the word 'orange'". Trivial for a human but requires just a bit of customization for a bot, enough that most spammers won't bother.
I'm building a bespoke replacement for the wiki since all the pages share the same structure and the mediawiki solution isn't as user-friendly as I'd like.
Hopefully I won't do anything dumb like the naïve contact form I'd made that turned into a spam vector because I was putting unsanitized user input into mail headers.
