I haven't experienced it with Hogan's Diner myself, but I have had a similar problem with the school many times. Apparently, story progression tries to send too many sims to a certain rabbit hole at one time, and they end up in a logjam.
The most repeated solution I've read for the school is to put a second school on the other side of town, the idea being that the game will route sims to the closest school (or diner), so some of the kids would end up going to the new school and free up the gridlock. It's supposed to take a few sim days to work itself out. I have to say it didn't seem to work for me, but maybe I was just impatient. I know that it has worked for a lot of people. You could try it with the diner.
You could also change the lot type in Edit Town to something that may attract fewer sims. I usually have the opposite problem: no townies anywhere. I've never seen any townies in a "small park," and there are tons of them in Riverview. I usually go around changing most of them to "big park" just so my town doesn't look dead. The wiki lists all the lot types and which types of sims will and won't be attracted to each. You could experiment to see which lot type attracts an "appropriate" number of townies.
The thing is, DivinylsFan, that you DID receive some good advice on this thread, and at first you didn't even say whether or not you tried any of that advice. You never even said thank you. You merely whined about having to make a new town and made a sarcastic remark to the effect that you think you're being ignored and treated badly because - what? Because you only got one reply instead of ten or twelve? Petulance is not pretty.
I've seen you make similar remarks on other threads as well, outright accusing the community here of what you derisively term "noob treatment."
This forum is about one one-hundredth as active as it used to be, but even now one look through the threads in General will show you that the community is still, on the whole, helpful and friendly. If somebody asks a question and gets few or no answers, maybe it's because nobody has read that thread who feels qualified to help with that problem. Or maybe, as you think, they just don't feel like posting. It's just a discussion forum for TS3 players, after all; nobody's obligated to rush to anybody else's aid. The fact that they do it anyway makes them look admirable from where I sit. The virtual stomping and gnashing of teeth isn't likely to get you helped any faster.
