My sims are disappearing when I send them to a community lot. I have built a number of my own community lots but recently when I send them there, the lot comes up as if I was still building them and the sims don't appear.
I recently used a cheat in one of the neighborhoods to give a couple of sims extra wants. Does that have anything to do with that? How do I fix this?

Try going back to their homes and wait for a taxi to appear with them returning home. If that doesn't happen, use the Batbox option to find missing family members. If you are using a mod to open buy/build modes while at a community lot and don't have all the EPs, it's possible that mod is causing a problem. I may be wrong about the EPs, but had that problem and removing it fixed the community lot access. It might have been a wrong version of the mod, I don't really remember.

Do your community lots have the blue public phone on them?

They do appear when I go back to their homes, this problem is just not letting have sims doing different things in the community lots. eg. I built a 2 level shopping center with clothing store, cinema, pool hall, bowling alley and a couple of over stores, plus a couple of vending machines (including one that has mobile phones, mp3 players and hand held games (which teens sometimes say they want to purchase)). When I send them there, the sims don't show.

Did you see my post?

Yes I did see your post and the blue telephones are there. Last week, I was able to send my sims to a community lot and I was able to control where and what my sims do. Now when I send my sims to a community lot they either walk or taxi comes to pick them up to take them to the lot, the window comes up for loading that lot, then when the community lot comes up, no sims.

Okay, we don't have enough information to tell you what's going on here. You'll have to troubleshoot it. Go to the Help forum and tell it you want to start a new post - it'll take you straight to the Game Help FAQ. Follow the instructions in the FAQ - follow, don't just read; it doesn't have to make sense to work - and if nothing there helps, go ahead and start a thread. Make notes of what happens while following the FAQ instructions, as the way in which it fails to work may give someone the clue they need to suggest a solution.

I uninstalled Sims 2 + expansion packs and reinstalled them, unzipped all the downloads and went through and installed all the additional things and it is still happening. It looks like it might be something in the downloads folder causing it. Will running the debug cheat solve the problem?

You are giving yourself unnecessary work, very rarely is the issue in the installation files, 9 times out of 10 its CC. Always test that first. Running a debug test might show you what the problem is or it might not, it certainly doesn't fix issues only shows them. The best way is to make a back up, make a test hood, pull your cc and do a 50/50 test. Or if it's well sorted, do that with your mods while leaving the rest out.

You didn't by chance grab that mod that gives extra options on cars did you? That clashes with community lot time, just had that issue a month ago.

Also this is a help question not a chat topic, moving to help.