Yea it's possible to just disable it, but not sure if that's risky
AFAIK the SMF code for the forum is quite outdated so you could try updating that and see if that fixes it
That's part of the issue--I have zero experience with SMF either; I don't want to start pressing buttons and breaking things
. And no, I won't be disabling it--we get enough spam as it is, we don't need an influx of bots on top of everything.