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.

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.

Who cares? They can probably sell more advertising which is fine with me. I want the people that run this site to make money and make it the best chess site they can for the people that do play.

On a side note: I'm happy to see that the Republicans of chess.com has only 9 members. 

How is the number of 'members' relevant to our experience on this site? Whether there is 100,000 or 100,000,000 how is this important?

I was just noticing something that didn't really make sense. If you just want to be rude, you can find some other thread.

Tao999, that is exactly what I was thinking.