Comment by transcriptase

phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.

I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.