I have been playing on Ashbringer for a few days now, the population has been growing, the server does for sure feel more alive but don’t expect to have the same level of activity that Firemaw (at least on Alliance side) or other of those full/high pos servers have.
The server is building up again, people that say otherwise have no idea what they are talking about.
To give you an idea and this has been done by someone of the Ashbringer server, that person has been supplying data about numbers and on September 15th Ashbringer had 215 players on the Horde side and 310 on Alliance, yesterday September 25th Horde had 434 players and Alliance had 405, if you go here Save ashbringer - #195 by Balkmog-ashbringer and scoll down you will see the stats i mentioned.
So no matter how badly peoplew wish that Ashbringer was dead and gone, the server is building up again.