Kinda funny how I joined surf a while back for the memes and i was like "les go meme on jb" and then killed surf because everyone left to go to jb. xdddd
Anyways, even though I never play I wanna give my two cents on this. Some people keep defending the more dead servers by saying "Well in the summer.." well heres the thing, is summer anywhere near being here? No. I feel like the best thing to be done is just to get rid of the dead servers if so wished and then put a select few back up over the summer to see how they do, no reason to keep them up the entire time when apparently it will get better in the summer.
VSH has its possibilties, but as stated before, when the old plugin was removed a good portion of its playerbase left and either went to different servers or games.
I'm sure if you find some that you think people would like you can just make a post requesting to get them added :)
I would like to point out how we popped deathrun with some regulars for a few weeks a while back. kek
On the subject of "populating the servers", even if you do hold events to populate some servers, it really doesn't matter unless the people that join it enjoy the gamemode, since from what I've seen, you start an event to do so, some people join, and then the next day the server's dead again. So again, unless you can get people to stay there, population events are useless and people are just gonna want to be there to try and make it better, even though it won't.
I believe this is due to the reason people don't really know we have a tf2ware server, I played a bit of this mode with Bello a while back, it was pretty fun, just that people don't know we have it is more than likely the cause.
Well isn't that kinda the reason staff members are a thing, there's an motd for a reason, as long as the staff member who is on a server isn't just destroying everyones fun I don't see a problem with them trying to uphold what is stated in the motd.
K well that's all I got.
TL;DR: Remove dead servers until the summer since people say they will be more active at that time. When brought back in summer make an announcement stating they are back, if they don't do good during the summer either, consider permanently removing them.