I've opted to start the release candidates early. They will continue from now until the end of December, at which time 0.8 will be considered battle hardened and a final 0.8 release will be created. The 0.8 release on January 1st will be the last 0.8 release. By the time enough bug fixes have accrued to warrant a update to the Jan 1st release of 0.8, another release will likely be ready to go. Bug fixes will obviously be merged into the SVN head, so they will make it into subsequent releases. 

You should note that the API in 0.8 is almost nothing like the API in 0.7.7. This is on purpose, and it is a huge improvement. I'm much happier with the 0.8 API, so it will be the API that will take us to 1.0. If the old API turned you away from OpenGUI, now would be a good time to re-evaluate it.

Amethyst is far from done, so it is not being released in binary form. The source for it is included, but I would urge you not to use it yet as the API in Amethyst is not stable.

Compiling from source now requires SCons . The Visual Studio .NET 2003 project files have been removed. None of the core developers use them, and with SCons you don't need them to build from source. Linux support is still not provided, but if anyone out there wants to start the porting early, this is a good version to base it on.

I'm done fighting the OCR spam bots. The forums will be down until I get the new OCR resistant human authentication method up. It shouldn't take too long.

UPDATE:
The new captcha algorithm is in place, along with some other various forums bugfixes. I tested all possible action paths (new account registration, account activations, and password changes) and everything seems to be working well. Now all we can do is sit back and see if the spam bots figure out the new protections. The default captcha that comes with phpBB2 is pretty simplistic, so I'm not that surprised that OCR spam bots could read it. I doubt they'll have much luck with this one though. Only time will tell.