I managed to write scripts that were good enough to mitigate spam as it was happening but it was all still pretty janky and worst of all, still reactionary. I needed something to close the door before they got in.
When you're walking into unknown territory and face new opponents you sometimes have to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
I made some public chat rooms to chat about servers and networking, but after a while we got attacked by spam from servers all around the world.
I had to choose between giving up on public rooms and taking the L or fighting against the spam to demonstrate that we can in fact have nice things.