Yes, there is apparently 1,023 members of the official forum controlled by the dev team; it would probably be completely impossible for them to inflate the number of users by changing a number in a database, right? I'm not accusing anyone of anything, just pointing out that there is no transparency in the process.
I'm more curious why it would even matter if it were true. As a thought experiment, let's assume for a moment that everything you say were to actually happen. Also, let's assume that all of the remaining 5,000 spots minus all of the people that have publicly posted they were accepted into the airdrop were filled by nothing but successful scammers, devs, and little magical fairies. In that scenario, everyone that managed to get in still receives 168 coins for
FREE. Anything less than 5,000 spots means the participants get even more than that. Nobody was asked for or paid any money. This really seems like complaining about receiving free money to me.
Further, if the devs wanted to keep all the coins, why would they have even bothered with an airdrop to begin with? The suggestion that they went through the entire airdrop process, of which there are already a huge number of people that have publicly posted they were accepted to, in order to turn around and keep the very same coins they simply could've simply kept to begin with seems like an whole heck of a lot of work to end up with less coins than they would've had without it.
Decred could've easily stated that they'll do their best to make sure that folks aren't gaming the system via participation in the airdrop for a limited 5,000 participants. But, Decred opted to up the ante after being approached with how the system could easily be gamed (by me - NO OTHERS to date), whereupon they responded with having layers of defense mechanisms in place to ward off said gaming.
Unless you spoke to them via PMs where more was stated, which is certainly possible, it appears to me like you are overstating the response. I remember seeing the response and what you're saying here is not what I remembered reading, so I went and found the response. Here it is:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13493398I'll quote the relevant pieces:
This is a fair concern. There are a number of verification steps involved ... No system is going to be perfect, but reasonable steps can be taken to make it as inclusive and fair as possible.
I don't see anything there at all that even remotely implies "layers of defense mechanisms". In fact, quite to the contrary, they even acknowledged the system wasn't "going to be perfect". I personally read "but
reasonable steps can be taken to make it as inclusive and fair
as possible" as doing exactly what you said where they could have "easily stated that they'll do their best to make sure that folks aren't gaming the system".
especially here at this BTCtalk forum... that's why I hate it here 