Thanks for all your input people.
Something rather strange and quite nice happened today.
I woke up, had breakfast. Started sipping my coffee.......read my email......logged on to my clan site and checked out the server status.
40/40
It's like 11
0 AM in the morning! I've been struggling to get 20 players at prime time and all of a sudden I've got 40 players and it aint even lunchtime!
Anyway.......I did add bots in reluctantly. I didn't want to go down that route at first, as I didn't want the server to be known as "that server with the bots". I put on 8 bots, configured to be auto-kicked when humans turn up.
Now, someone said to me today, that server uptime is important. You see, the server is new. I've been constantly changing files, adding and removing software. To be honest, it's been rebooted at least once every 24 hours for one reason or the other.
An American friend told me, that servers should be up for 48 hours. Then the Steam server list takes the server seriously.
Can I have a second opinion on that?
Is that the reason why I have players now? Because my server has actually been running for more than 48 hours without a reboot?
That being the case, am I likely to see a drop the next time I reboot?
Cheers.