Its amazing how many automated attacks go on without people realising. My NAS/Servers logs used to be absolutely full of entries trying to either crack my SSH password or exploit vulnerabilities on software running on my web server, until I switched to pfSense and region blocked incoming connections at the router instead.
Unfortunately I can't remember what regions were the worst, its been a long time, but they were regions I'd never need to connect from so an easy fix to block them.
I congratulate you on wanting to keep the forum open to all, if it were me I'd be awfully tempted to just block those regions.
