Drift - we are more lucky than most I guess. We have a good core of high level players who are active several hrs a day and we have built up a second core of medium players who are active daily as well.
Part of the reason is of course that we have been pretty successful at WW, this keep our members interest up.
We are currently 44 players (kicked 3 players a week ago and so far got 1 new), and usually we have 32-37 to choose from when declaring 30x30 wars.. but if the "new member issue had been resolved we would probably have kicked 5-6 more. One reason why we have a strong core now is that we were very good at weeding out players who didn't contribute before.. now we must be careful with the "weeding". So the main problem with the lack of new member inflow is that alliances will die because you cannot so easily weed out the non-contributors
Actually the system, as it is now, favors the big alliances with many sister alliances... If you have 10 sister alliances, like some do, u have a higher inflow, since you have more entry points and you just move the best up the ladder gradually, keeping a couple of strong alliances at the top. Stand alone alliances will suffer