I tend to agree, if say 2 000 000 people have used their accounts once or twice a few years ago and have not returned since, I think it is fair to consider those accounts to not be members, but abandoned accounts/non-members.
I would also bet that there are more than a few "members" who are simply duplicate accounts, and that there should be a formula that might guestimate the percentage of accounts from the same IP adress that are indeed duplicates and remove those from the "membership" numbers as well.
I noticed on the homepage that there are 5,199,018 members. I have only ever seen about 5,500 online at any given time and I realized that there must be over 1,000,000 accounts that have been created and abandoned. I know that time zones differ and the number of players online rises at certain times of day, but over 5 million seems like a big number.
There are only about 300,000 games logged and it would seem to me that it would take 600,000 players at 1 game for every 2 players to make that number. That is not even 1 million players!
I get the feeling that the number is wrong and reflects all accounts, even those that have not been accessed in over 3 years like a friend of mines. It feels like fraud to me to make the site seem more popular than it is. I am not saying that the staff is plotting to make the site more popular, I just think that the numbers are ridiculous.
I won't respond to ride or pointless trolling comments.