Hi Richard,
Seems like this forum is starting to attract "fake" users. I've just googled for the names of the two users who registered on Sun May 18, 2008 8:00 am and Mon May 19, 2008 2:28 am, with the following results, only to find that both users signed up for multiple forums on the same day in a variety of different languages (turkish, romanian, spanish, portugese, german, vietnamese (!), ...), on extremely varied topics. Both showed several hits for the day, but no hint of any previous existence prior to that.
It was no doubt for this reason that Ruud chose to require account activation for sudocue.net. Of course, this decision worked against us in the end, although Ruud's unannounced decision to simply "abandon ship" can be regarded as exceptional circumstances...
If we don't also take action at some stage, we stand a good chance of ending up in the same situation as the
DJApe forum, with (at the time of writing) 2939 members, of which only 154 (i.e., 5.24%, trend strongly downwards) have ever made a post.
An interesting short blog on this subject can be found here:
http://www.communityspark.com/keep-your-phpbb-member-count-accurate/.