Suggestions?

Tips&Tricks taken from this thread...

Attracting:
- NRAAS SP has a function called "rapid immigration".; Move in families manually through edit town ; Increase Population.
- Edit deviceconfig.yml
- More Sims In Clubs.
- Place down certain rabbit holes (...) on the lot, as they attract sims so use it to your advantage.
- Shimrod's mods.
- Reduce the number of community lots.
- Converting a world from suburb into a city to fill the nightlife spots.
- Spa can be turned into amusement parks by adding a bistro to it and setting the lot as a Hangout.
- Sims are attrated to the stores, BG restaurants, hospital, theatre, stadium, and city hall.
- Overwatch fixes broken combo-rabbit holes and respective ones attract sims.
- Arcade are very strong attractors
- Salons are strong attractors.
- Exclusive loungers are most popular of them, followed by Fusion, and the least - Vampire.
- Local watering hole bars are the most popular of them, followed by Sports, and the least - Dive.
- Disco clubs are the most popular of them, followed by Dance, and the least - Pool.

Repelling:
- Set every lot that has a rabbithole on it (except for the one you wanna pull sims to) to "No Visitors Allowed", especially and even those remote lots that has no any.
- Turn some Big Parks into Small parks.
- Arboretum & vault of antiquity in art gallery works well by keeping the lot less crowded.
- Bouncer ropes deter visitors.
- Rabbitholes that won't attract visitors alone are the military base, the criminal hideout, police station, spa, science lab, the mausoleum, the film studio and all combo-rabbitholes (unless you use the mod).

I would go into edti town and select a family to move into town whenever I want to have new immigrants arrive in town so my first settlers have neighbors to meet.I also make them build their house like the first settlers and will add other families the same way gradually over time with gaps between each arrival so they get to settle in before new families start arriving.I also play the town instead of just a family.

Thought does it help with community lots?

I think these two mods by Shimrod might help:
http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php...ut-on-the-town/
http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php...ut-on-the-town/

They push inactive and service sims to community lots.

A lot of this depends on how the world that you are playing is structured and set-up. Every lot has a certain rating that determines how many Sims (may) show up at any moment of time, ranging from 0 to how many Sims your computer can handle (there is a certain maximum number of Sims that I can't remember right now).
So, before you start editing your game files or adding mods there are several things you can do manually to increase the visitor rate:
1. Set every lot that has a rabbithole on it to "No Visitors Allowed". If the rabbithole is interactive (grocery store, bookstore, hospital etc.) Sims will still use it but they will only come to visit the rabbithole building, not the lot.
2. Reduce the number of community lots. Not every world needs three instances of every community lot type. Especially the Late Night and Showtime venues; those are pretty wasted on worlds that are neither cities nor focused on performers. The disco club in Bridgeport is always full, while the same club in Sunset Valley is always empty.
A supernatural hangout in a world with only a handful of supernaturals is also a waste of space.
3. Close down lots that are very remote; if a beach lot, for example, is at the far end of the map and not connected to any road, it might be good to set that to ""No Visitors Allowed"". Otherwise there will always be a small group of inactive Sims walking there and thus spend the whole day just doing that. Or if you've got a fishing spot far up in the mountains, close that, too. You can still visit it and go fishing, but inactives won't go there anymore.
4. Increase your population.

This thread contains a lot of additional information, too: Multi-Function Lots

ETA: I don't use any mods for this and I did not edit my graphics rules file but following these things I have some lots in certain worlds with up to 20 visitors.

ETA2: Maybe you could tell us what world you are playing. If I have it I can have a look on how it could be improved.

I'm not sure whether we aren't confusing two distinct things here: populating a world with Sims as residents and getting those Sims to actually go about town and visit (populate) community lots.

I don't know how Nraas handles populating empty residential lots but for a house to qualify as livable it needs enough beds and above all a fridge, a trashcan and a mailbox. Without a fridge you cannot move Sims in (except under certain conditions in Edit Town and in-game). When I still played with story progression on deleting the fridges was the way to guarantee that a house stayed empty.

Sorry, we're all out of experts currently. We have more on order, but there is apparently some sort of backlog happening.

There is a MC command to fix broken objects on a lot, not upgrade. I believe the command you are thinking of is from DebugEnabler, but I can only get it to show on mailboxes which suggests it's only for residential lots and their objects (not the mailboxes themselves). Perhaps the lot types need to be flipped to Residential temporarily for this to work?

I tried will try yours first, since it's involved messing around with vanilla options. If that fails. I'll be sure to use other peoples input from here. Thanks.

And yes I can tell what world I'm playing in, which is Sunset Valley. I just only have problems with Late Night Shipped community lots, which yes all those clubs-lounges-bars-haangouts.

I can use DebugEnabler's Upgrade command on all lot types and objects.

And as regards the main topic, well, of course you won't have any lack of visitors with a population count of 300. But I usually try to keep my population below the 100 mark and this is where controlling the visitor flow becomes almost like a separate game in itself. (I did play a lot of city building games before I picked up simming.)

My current world has 63 residents at the moment, some 15 of which are children or teens, so, in essence, I have roughly 40 Sims to juggle around. The world has several park lots, which are moderately high attractors, 3 fishing spots, which attract Anglers and Sims with at least one skill point in fishing, 2 graveyards, which does attract occasional visitors, 2 art galleries and, above all, all Late Night venues. In its default set-up this world suffers from empty Late Night bars.
In order to improve that I did the following:
1. Converted the world into a city world by editing the .world file in S3PE. This is the major thing to do when you intend to play with a lot of Late Night lots for several reasons: First, the attraction score for nightlife spots is higher in city worlds than suburban worlds. Second, the residents' work schedules in city worlds is more in line with the venues' opening times; no one visits a disco club in Sunset Valley after 10pm, except for Sims in the criminal, music and culinary careers, because meta-autonomy sends all other Sims home around 10pm.
2. Turned all rabbithole lots into No Visitors, because I don't need stalkers on the school lot or spies on the science and military lots. The world has one lot with the theater, bookstore and grocer rabbithole. I set it to No Visitors, too, because it will be one of the busiest lots anyway due to the pull from these three RH types.
3. Turned some of the Big Parks into Small Parks, because these have a lower attraction score and I'd rather have more Sims in one park than next to none in all of them.
4. I placed the arboretum and vault of antiquity RHs on the two art gallery lots. Both RHs have a moderate intensity so it won't turn the museums into rally sites.
5. I did turn another RH lot into a hangout, though, with the bistro and spa RHs on it and a second building that I equipped with typical hangout furnishings. That lot is now a multi-function super-lot. While the spa doesn't attract visitors the bistro does and combined with the hangout score and the objects Sims will love this place. Yesterday I counted some 15 Sims at 1am. That's a quarter of my overall population count!
6. I also deleted most of the bouncer ropes in the Late Night venues. For some reason the mere presence of a bouncer rope seems to deter visitors right from the start, i.e. none turn up.

On an additional note, three of the parks are right next to each other, so I can easily observe which one scores the best. The Small Park is almost always empty but between the two Big Parks the clear winner is the one with playground equipment. It's the only one that also attracts children. Therefore I get the impression that certain object do also have a meta-autonomy attraction score. A Big Park without a playground, on the other hand, hardly attracts children, only adults.

Three more notes:
- If your town hasn't many pet owners you can do away with all dog parks, cat jungles and horse training grounds. Nobody will visit them.
- If you want some sort of nightlife in a suburban world you will be better served with the University Life lot types instead of the Late Night ones.
- The Showtime venues are next to useless in a world without a lot of Sims (both residents and homeless) in the performing professions; the catch though is, once you've got a lot of performers then these will be the only ones who attend the Simfests. These lot types are the biggest let-down in any other town but Starlight Shores; and even there I have halved the number of performance venues and turned the other half into arcades, bars and clubs. The arcade, btw, is now the busiest lot in Starlight Shores.

Double post, in order to keep things tidier.

There are, of course, many other factors that determine how lively your town is. One of them is the career distribution as careers will also encourage specific behaviour during off-times. Criminals, for example, are more likely to visit the graveyard at night and are the ones who fill up dive bars. Gyms are autonomously hit by athletes, military staff and criminals.

Trait distribution is also important, as are skill points. If you start a town where the residents have no skill points anywhere try changing that and watch the change in town activity.
Examples: junkyards will remain empty without any Sims with points in inventing; dive spots will only be visited by Sims with points in scuba diving; same with fishing spots.

A lot of this is determined in the Venues.xml file. Nikel once converted it into a handy Excel sheet. Let's see whether I can retrieve the link.

Most community lots with rabbit holes (like the one that includes stores&theater) that seem to have undefine assigment from the looks of it. Also If it helps, I evicted every premade household before moving in my own sim. (Sunset Valley).

@nitromon would it help If I hid rabbit holes in real building lots under in a basement with no access to the room they are present? I would like to attract seems without 'em going to the rabbit holes but stay above ground. I hope that won't cause tantrum for routing.

Sunset Valley? OK, let's see whether I remember what I did there.

1. All rabbithole lots set to No Visitors Allowed, including, and above all, Mirabello Plaza.
2. Set the remote Beach lot in that far-off bay to No Visitors as well as the lot underneath the Wolff manor and the little park between the Bunch and Steel households
3. I've added the UL arcade on the 40x40 lot next to Christopher Steel, built an elixir and consignment store in the empty house between Claire Ursine and the Goddard household, a laundromat (neat Sims are addicted to it) on the 30x20 lot next to the Bunch family and a fusion lounge on the 40x30 lot opposite that spot. There's also a blank 30x30 community on the street leading to the French family; there I placed the Business as Usual bistro lot, but removed all the bistro stuff and refurbished it to become a hangout with a bar, pool table and nectar racks.
4. Added roughly a dozen new Sims.
5. Arboretum went to the fishing spot between the Altos and Landgraabs, Vault of Antiquity into the now No Visitors park between the Bunchs and Steel

That's almost all I did there. No salon, no other LN venues, no performance venues, no festival grounds. I did upgrade the existing community lots with lots of new objects though (easels and science equipment in the library, a bar in the art gallery, pool stuff in the pools, a sauna in the gym, massage tables on pool lots and the gym, a hot tub here and there, trampoline in the gym, more playground stuff in the central park).
So far, it's turned out nicely.

That's because Sunset Valley was made before the lot assignment system was added.

How are they set-up? Do they have jobs, friends and coworkers, skills?

That's not possible. Sims need access to the rabbitholes.

Changed a few bit. That Beach and Stadium (though the latter threw me a warning that a 'special building' will have to be deleted'.

I think you can safely ignore that message. Changing a community lot from one type to another doesn't delete anything. Maybe it did in the past but it doesn't now, or at least I am not aware of anything missing afterwards.

More recent EA worlds don't have that many more inhabitants. They are all under 100 in any case.
(ETA: Isla Paradiso, for example, has 56/60 - 4 Sims are pregnant)

The world I am currently playing is, I think, medium sized. At least there are still quite a few unoccupied lots in it. I could add, hm, maybe 15 more families, until I begin to run out of space.

One thing I have issues with, and it's something I mentioned in the rabbit hole thread, is how small the worlds are. And the scaling issues that are caused by it. Sunset Valley works perfectly fine as a small-ish town, but Bridgeport isn't adequate at all. In B'88, I feel like I can barely show Bridgeport because of how small it is. I can't get interesting footage of it, it's just too small. So I'm having to come up with a lot of other ways to portray Bridgeport. I have other city worlds standing in for Bridgeport where needed, and in the future I may have to use full-on CGI and stuff to create cityscapes.

So I had put a bunch of few rabbit holes in the vampire lounge. The Club wasn't filled much with sims, but that's likely due I had came (well, the police escorted me to there because my vampire was a bit naugthy at the hospital) past opening hours, so it was closed. However, some sims did ARRIVE outdoors of the lot, which is some kind of progress.

Have yet to check, but I'll try to check and see If anybody arrives at the lounge story.

It's not a good idea to place rabbitholes on a lot type that has opening and closing times. It conflicts with that most RHs are supposed to be accessible for 24 hours.