After the upgrade, I finally was able to get a new image verification captcha working. A new captcha is probably going to be our best defence against bots because they've all adapted to phpbb's default captcha, and can figure it out without any problems. Our sweet new one uses different fonts and colors to fool the bots.
Here's to hoping that our bot signups will be significantly reduced.
That's what inspired me to make the upgrades. 
