I left this site offline for a number of months after I had a bit of a server crash at home. Long story short, the disks in my little server were all fried and the chance of recovery of all my old stuff seems extremely remote.
On the bright side, I had a reason to move some stuff to a hosting company, redo all the configuration for this site (and some others) and look into what’s new in the WordPress-world.
One huge improvement I found so far is the completely reworked reCAPTCHA which is now more like “no captcha”. Having read a bit about it and then tried it out… it seems really solid and works well on smartphones too.