Sorry Dan,
Alexa is usually pretty accurate unless somebody is intentionally playing with the numbers. It's why Corral and Stangnet are ranked in the top 30,000 english speaking sites in the world, and Mustangworks is 147,000.
The rating compares the number of hits, page views, and reach that a site has.
While the forums aren't the only reason people visit, it's one of the biggest that actually shows your sites attractiveness to users. The artificial increase in memberships can probably directly be attributed to you altering the need to be a member to view pictures, ie 2005 Mustang. That will do a lot to increase members, but nothing to increase the number of people visiting. Oh, I can understand why you would choose to do that. Not only does it make a good number to point to when claiming the site is still "hopping" but it also keeps expensive (though this site doesn't seem to use too much anymore) bandwidth from being linked all over the internet at your expense.
Also, summer was always a little slow, but there have been 2 posts in female power in the last 10 days, one of them is "quiet?". BOL has about 5 active threads on a given day, SRC has been dead as noted by Sky.
The message board is the life of this site, and without it, the site would be completely unknown because the individual members are your advocates and mainly your advertising, though it looks like a couple new pop-ups have shown up for fun.
