It doesn't quite work like that either, but you're closer. The last two years will all count as one round.. but because it was so long it'll obviously count for a lot more than the previous rounds. It'll be worth progressively less and we go through the rounds though -- it'll still be easy to move up/down the list from now on. Above all else it's important to remember activity works on ranks. It doesn't know if #1 has only been a tiny bit more active than #2 or has been 1000 times more active. If you had infinite activity it'd just mean you were ranked #1 on activity. It just treats it as a rank. When you consider that most people were really inactive during the big break, most people are on a reasonably level playing field anyway. If you were ranked 60 in activity and then stopped posting, you might be ranked 70 now.. but that's not a big difference in the scheme of things, and it'll be easy to change by being active now. And that's before we go into the fact that lots of things other than activity decide your skill level.. and that a few things other than your skill level determine your performance. Nothing has really changed that much; people are just reading too much into it.
In less cryptic terms though (WARNING: I'm probably missing a fair bit, I was inactive around the time Merkgate hit): Basically Cribb was having server troubles. Then Merk (who Cribb knew through the NRL Manager 2004 forums) offered him an exclusive deal to host the site on his own server. Trouble was it was not his own server but another server, and after a couple of times he failed to pay overdue server payments. Therefore CricSim temporarily shut down, and if it wasn't for fluke chance, it may have shut down forever.
