If I may contribute with my experience of living in wormholes.
Just for some background, so you can put this into perspective, we lived in a C4, there were 7 active players and maybe another 4 players who more or less visited during a week, rarely staying long enough to participate in a full night's activities.
Firstly, do not consider your home WH as your main hunting ground. As Dakorma has stated, you'll clean it out in a few days, and due to the 'lottery' system for WH sites, it may be weeks before anything else shows up. I'll explain the lottery:
All WH systems are entered into a lottery, or a raffle if you prefer the analogy. There are a static number of 'sites' available across the whole WH collection, these sites do not de-spawn unless they are first disrupted by a player visiting them (or scanning them, I'm not sure, but I believe you must actually try to warp to them first... you only have to get the warp-in popup, you can then cancel the warp and it will still count, but you have to get that popup first.) When a site de-spawns a new one will spawn somewhere, I believe there is a timer involved, but not sure how long it is. Where the new site spawns is chosen via the lottery, with empty wormholes having a higher chance or winning the lottery than wormholes with lots of sites in them already.
However, due to the 'static' nature of these sites, if there's a wormholes that's rarely ever visited, eventually it will collect a lot of sites and will in effect become a site sink, preventing other wormholes from getting much action. So, if you're passing through a WH, and happen to scan down a bunch of sites, even if you have no intention of actually running the sites for profit, initiate a warp to them then cancel the warp once you get the popup. This will cause the site to eventually de-spawn after a little while, depending on the type of site, and might result in some spawning in your WH, or one of the ones you're going to be raiding in a day's time.
This all comes together to mean that there's nearly no point in considering your WH a resource. Do not try to preserve the sites in it, don't aim to conserve it so you can do your hunting there later, because even if you are very careful in how you use the sites, you will probably exhaust them eventually. Or they'll get replaced by sites you don't want (perhaps you want regular mining, but you get gas mining, or you want combat, but you get mining... in my experience gas mining sites are much more prevalent than regular mining sites, or combat sites) Also, while you're being careful and avoiding to hunt too often, everyone will be getting bored, because in a WH that's all there is to do. Not to mention, if you avoid running the sites, you're not making money, which is counter productive on another level. Finally, if you don't run the sites, someone else will when they pass through—either wanting to kill the sleepers and grab the loot (and if their combat force is bigger than yours, then you'll simply have to sit under your shield feeling like derps as you watch all the money you carefully preserved get hoovered up by someone else) or they'll just pop the sites as I described above, so they'll re-spawn elsewhere.
In short, the key to running sites in a WH, is not to run the sites in your own system. Consider them a nice, easy to reach bonus, one that should be collected as soon as you can. Instead, the real goal should be in raiding neighbouring wormholes. To this end, you should ABSOLUTELY NOT settle in a wormhole system whose static exit is another wormhole. A merc corp I ran with, priror to the WH corp I joined, did this when they tried out WH living. They were in a C3 with a link to low-sec, and we got so bored that the corp eventually collapsed in on itself through infighting and silliness. This means you wont always have a guaranteed way out of the WH, but you will not need to visit high-sec more than once a week, where as, depending on activity, you'll want to be raiding a different wormhole once or twice a day.
To quickly explain static exits to people who don't know how they work; each wormhole is guaranteed an exit. The exit will re-spawn within 10 minutes if it closes prematurely, the exit will lead to a class of space, not a specific system. So you might have a static that leads to C4 wormholes (which we had in our C4, which was very good for us, but meant we were virtually assured that we'd need to scan at least 3 WH away to get out to known-space again) or it might lead to a C1, or low-sec, or high-sec or null-sec. Wherever it leads, it will always generate a new exit to the same type of space.
While it's very tempting to get a place that will always lead back to high-sec, or at least low-sec, just so you know you can get more fuel, in all honesty you will need to refuel very infrequently (we only made a fuel run about every 3 weeks, we just bought a lot at a time, and took all our loot out in the same operation) compared to how often you'll want to be able to run combat sites/mining sites. If you don't have a static to another WH, you'll be entirely reliant on random 'site' spawns that happen to be wormholes, or, in worst case scenario, you'll be reliant on someone else's static connecting to your WH.
It's always better to be the ones connecting to somewhere else, rather than having another WH connect to you. The way WH tunnels work, is that only the entrance is spawned to start with. Once you visit the entrance, it will randomly spawn the exit, so in effect as long as you don't go to the WH, it isn't linked anywhere, so you don't have to worry about anyone jumping through from the other side yet. Also, you can arrange a war party before jumping to your static WH, which means you've got a combat group ready to bust through into someone else's space from the very instant that there's a bridge between your two WHs. They will almost certainly not be prepared so the chance of a quick gank is good if there's any activity in the other WH.
Wow, that's so much text! On just one point, I'd wanted to reply to all of them. However, I think I'll shut up before I make anyone go blind lol. Hope this helps, though
~Cern (Mostyn on Eve)
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