They killed captcha support in 0.18, which basically negates one of the methods to stop the bots… so if we upgrade, we will likely need to email verification until 0.18.1 is released OR stay on 0.17.4 until 0.18.1 is released where they’ve promised to bring it back.
No, absolutely not. Not until 0.18.1 is released and captcha has returned, and hopefully an upgraded more complicated version of captcha.