SOO, I hate low signup nights

In Australia, we have a football thing called State of Origin. It's 5 matches of rugby spaced over 5 Wednesdays. I think it is possibly my most hated sport ever. Every SOO we invariably dont get enough singups to run on our main push/farm night with a clean ID (as maintenance for oceanic is Tuesday night at about 8pm server time).

So what can you do about that?
Well, the best thing to do is not run the main raid. Trying to run with a crippled group is not going to be good for morale. Split off into 10man runs, give people a night off to chillax. Try a previous tier content achievement run (there are rumours spreading in the guild at the moment that a 20 man undying naxx run could be on the cards, and I like this idea as we never won the Random DC game when it mattered, and I still want the title!).

But, what if this is a regular thing, like, we are short on numbers a lot?
Well, that means you need to recruit, but in this climate that can be hard.

I am finding that we are beginning to pick up new recruits by pugging 25s. Pugging ulduar 10 to some extent but more to the point pugging naxx25. On a night where your numbers are too low, form up the raid (perhaps take in some alts for fun) and pug the last spots. You could try for Naxx or the first couple of ulduar bosses.

This has 2 benefits:
1 you are finding people who can raid at your times
2 you are trialling people before you even get to the application stage.

We have been doing this (with friday night naxx 25s and random alt ulduar 25 pugs, which were surprisingly successful) and we have had a couple of good applications from this process. Generally they are people newer to WoW, people who never raided in vanilla and did very little in TBC, so they need a little loving and training but are dead set keen to get into it!

Downside is if you are using DKP you might have to come up with some rules to include PUGs. But generally, if you let the PUGs know in advance what the loot rules are, they can decide whether or not they are interested in running that way. Don't get upset if people turn you down depending on how you run loot distribution.