It's been discussed before, but I would like to reiterate that username-spam is a pain to many online communities. It's particularly noticeable here, as any member can see all the usernames which accumulate on the 'Newest Nodes' page.

It sucks a little bit when you come to a site and find that your favorite username is already taken. It sucks a LOT when you find that your favorite username is taken, but that the old user never posted a single thought, never logged in after the first day, and it's been four years since they've even thought of the site.

My personal preference would be to have a culling process for abandoned names. I've mentioned that I implemented something similar on a trivia quiz game.

• keep the name forever if they've ever achieved rank 2
• keep the name for five years if they've ever posted a single node, question or reply
• keep the name for a year if they've ever voted on a poll or used the chatterbox
• keep the name for six months if they actually log in
• send an email a week before the name is about to be culled
• assign any old writeups to a user called 'the long departed' or something similar
• cull the name, allowing it for future signups

Pass all existing monk signups through this filter and I bet you end up culling at least 80% of all existing monks. Someone showed stats to this effect in previous discussions.

And secondly, please mark up the list of recent sign-ups with something css-able. The single column <table> there is useless. CSS-like would include a useful classname for each section, and <li> for each element. Then the default style could make them wrap in a grid-style. Users can also change that to make them show up in a smaller font, or hide them altogether.