In fairness, in the two prior years we got like ... one or two new members ... but yeah. Forums are a dying medium regardless. We had trouble bringing in pretty much since aone died, and moreso since gw-subs dissolved into their real lives too.

I finally got enough ahead of the unpatched hacked wordpress and drupal instances on the server to get it de-blacklisted most places, so we can actually send an email now and then. Not expecting an influx of good users, but hey, at least the seo-spambots can log in and fail to meet their objectives

When I turned registration off, we were bouncing about 40,000 bogus registration attempts per day that didn't even bother trying to deal with the weak 1-question verification test, but about a hundred a day were getting through at peak.