I have a lot of trouble believing people when they say they played the demo for a considerable amount of time before buying the game
I mean, for example (but he is definitely not the only example), freek registered his forum account in 2011, two years after I registered my first, and his ID is about 3 times mine. but I started playing in 2008 at the earliest...
there's no way to prove it, so saying you played the demo for a while just seems like a free "I've played longer than you" pass. I don't think it counts for anything anyway, because if you were just playing the demo, and hadn't registered on the forum, then you weren't really part of the community anyway :/
but whatever. it doesn't really matter I guess