If I'm not mistaken there are now 43,895 members on chess.com before there was only 15000, what happened?

we just changed the way we count ACTIVE members. the real count of members is on this page (people who have created an account): http://www.chess.com/members/member_countries.html

234,000 registered accounts. only 44,000 of them are somewhat "actively" playing Online Turn-based Chess. many of them are simply here for live chess, tactics trainer, chess mentor, or to read Rael's forum posts. :)

lol rael creates some great forum posts.

Ok, thanks Eric.

Erik*, sorry.