The crashes still empty the server pretty quickly. On days when the crashes are bad, we lose 5-10 people per crash, get repopulated a little, until we get down to 2-5 people and it's just not fun anymore.
The crashes are taking 5-10 people, but sometimes our ttt server is mostly empty during school hours from 8 am to 4 pm since most of the players come from North America and so on.
However, I do agree that we have to take action and keep the server populated, or fix the crash problem in order to keep our population up.
I suggest all of us take the duty of inviting friends ( admin or not), if you are part of the ttt community , you should take action like any steam player and invite more people, thus creating making use of this extravagant social gamer network that unites all players to the vast areas of our planet.
Second, I think we should limit our downloads and spare the lagg for others. I do not entirely know how the server functions in terms of online connection, but I do believe this has to do with player bandwidth usage and some lagg infested maps such as TTT_ALT BORDER that used to crash always.
Update: concerning the rules, I think it is a good idea to simplify them since it takes less time to read and gives the server more control over them by not spamming the bureaucratic shit all over the motd.
Experimentation is always key, we could put this update during the winter because less people play due to the holiday vacations and such. We could see if this ( simplification of the rules) helps the players understand them better or maybe causes rdm and more trolling. IMO