Hello and welcome!
As mentioned in our Server Rules there’s a Global Chat which has replaced (+) Trade Chat ingame.
We don’t like showing online players because that’s privileged information. This is also an extra reason not to go ingame and check if your friends or other players are online if you can just go on the website and check.
Players going away after the first day is not entirely our fault. We could have all those website features and still have low population. It’s a fun thing to code this, but you really have to know how it’s going to help the server. Personally, I don’t think it’ll help at all (I’m also against those things in general, which is why we removed online count etc.) We’ve had “reunion” events in the past and plan on doing more of those, but it all comes down to whether people really want to play and how much. Personally, I don’t mind the low population because population is not the reason I’m still running this server. I’m more than happy with the amount of people who come and have a bit of fun with their friends as well as the people who stick around longer, and I hope this shows.
The distance of shout (!) is the default shout distance, we have replaced trade (+) with global chat.
Hope this helps!