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If the above were true, why would a core of good members keep coming back, and why would the same members return after the crash of the domain last year?...
I think you just explained a lot. The site is small, and won't get any bigger (but do you care?) mostly because users can't register! The error message is unclear, the question(s) are unclear, there is no 'contact the administrator' link, the help is the out of the box for the administrator while you've customized the site so it no longer matches the help in any way, and the forum software is buggy (try hitting refresh on that registration page, the results are very interesting, especially where you customized the 'security' questions!
I stand by my comments: the site is poorly implemented, and it is no surprise that new members are few and far between. If you are not logging registration attempts, and reviewing carefully why each fails, you are not really doing your job as administrator. Several here have tried to register, none (that I can see) succeeded. I even tried with both IE and Firefox just in case your bugs were browser dependent. Oh, well, they were not--it fails consistently under both!
PM me if you fix it and I'll try to register again. If it works, great, if not I'll let you know exactly what happened.
