i have removed 8,849 accounts with 0 posts and spam links in their bio. this leaves 309 apioforum accounts remaining, many of which are probably also bots, but this is more manageable.
amusingly, the spam bots hadn't figured out how to post (only change their bio), so nobody could have possibly witnessed their existence unless they'd happened to guess one of their usernames.
please let me know if anything strange seems to be happening as a result of this