Mark doesn't seem to be around at the moment so you're stuck with me.

Yes, Riverside was made with no attached subhoods, so if you know how to convert it to a subhood it'll work fine. Have fun!

Thanks! Yes, it seems strange that I haven't tried playing Riverside yet

Yes it was made first in an AGS base game with no Maxis content, meaning that no NPC,s were made during the building of all the houses and community lots.
Its perfectly safe as a Shopping sub-hood. Just remember that it may take a few seconds the first time you go to one of the community lots for the game to gen up the new NPC's if there needed.
With over 4400 downloads with no complaint so far in 5 and a half years.

Hi, none of the lots are there once installed. All the characters are but they are on empty lots? I'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong?

Since this is not normal, at all, something is definitely wrong. It may not be so much something you're doing as something about your setup that doesn't work with the neighborhood or vice versa, which requires an inobvious action on your part. For instance, I forgot to give Land Grant University different instance numbers between the empty and populated versions, so people who want to use both in different neighborhoods have to actively swap them out in the neighborhood templates file. @marka93 are you aware of anything along those lines that might have been overlooked or might have suddenly become a problem on newer OS's?

The first thing to do is to go through the installation instructions step by step and see if there's anything that confuses you or that you inadvertently skipped. I can't think of any mistakes along those lines that would create the problem you have but I by no means have a comprehensive idea of all the accidents that can happen. One thing that happens with Sims 2 installed on newer machines is that the file paths have to be slightly different due to the internal architecture of the OS, for instance.

Another thing to do is to check your anti-virus software. Modern anti-viruses often mistake Sims 2 files for malware and quarantine them, and depending on the program will need to either need to be specifically told to accept them, or even turned off entirely (in which case, resign yourself to not being online on that machine while playing!). This is often the culprit when things that should be there, aren't, so it's always worth double-checking your permissions and your system.

Try those two things and report back, specifically describing what you did, and maybe Mark, who did the bulk of the work on the neighborhood and is more up on the technical details than I am, will be around by then.

This has a B107 where as the normal hood has N107,