One thing that irks me in the game is that every time a Sim goes to a community lot it's completely empty (except maybe for NPC's) and the townies and downtownies only show up a couple instants later. Isn't there a hack that makes the lot be already filled with sims when your sim gets there? Because it makes no sense. My Sims are always the first ones to get to the lot, I wish there would already be other sims there expecting me.

several things I take influence the number of community lot visitors::
-computer's performance level; the higher the level, the more potential visitors. performance level I take to be based on computer's capacity and on processor speed.
-time of day; some sim hours I take have more community lot visitors than others (at least in base game).
not entirely sure, but cheats might be able to change the number.

PupilSims does not want more visitor on community lots, they want the visitors to be already there as they arrive.
otherwise, i would have suggested this mod
http://modthesims.info/d/606146/mor...s-customer.html

Are you talking about owned community lots or unowned ones? In my game, there are usually townies already present when I send a Sim to an unowned community lot but not if the lot is owned. Then it takes a bit for other visitors to show. I don't think I have any mods that enable this, nothing that leaps to mind,anyway...unless Community Time does it...which is possible, I suppose. I've had it so long that I don't remember what things were like before I had it.

The only times I had sims already there as i arrived, I've been told it was not supposed to happen, and that the lot was supposed to reset but did not, this is why sims were already there...

I often have sims already there. I think it's your computer. I also have the visiting sims cheat in my cheat file OP, so maybe you need to set that.

Well, I get townies on community lots the first time I play a lot I just built, so it wouldn't have reset yet. I dunno, I guess I have something that's making them do it, then. It's been that way for years, and my game/neighborhoods are all fine, a few of them having been played for years now. The only community-lot oriented one I can think of that I have is Community Time, but not everyone wants that in their game since it gets rid of the "extra time" you get when you send Sims to community lots.

I do have settings in my userstartup that increase the number of allowed lot visitors rather than using a mod to do it. I don't know if having that override on would make the lot populate while it loads? Maybe it does.

I have mine set to:
intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims 20
uintProp maxTotalSims 55
uintProp maxTotalHumans 40
uintProp maxTotalPets 15

Since I don't want to overload places either. Try that in your user startup cheat file OP. Or get one if you don't. There are plenty that you can copy here on MTS.

I have basically the same settings as Jo, except my total-humans-pets numbers are 50-40-10 to Jo's 55-40-15. But we both capped the lot visitors at 20. I don't know if this is why we have pre-populated community lots, but it's an easy thing to try.