User blog comment:Toadgamer80/Closing Featured Character?/@comment-1874924-20130701061211

In terms of participation levels, Featured User is really the only healthy Feature we have right now. The others range from "sick" to "at Death's door, knocking loudly".

I'm in favor of allowing third-party nominations for FC. That will improve the chances of getting nominations for characters that people actually know, since a ballot full of unknown or barely known characters is the biggest obstacle to getting a decent voter turnout., but I'm afraid it doesn't address the bigger problem: reading activity on this wiki has collapsed by any standard that can actually be measured. There aren't all that many new stories to get people's attention, and it doesn't seem to occur to people to nominate characters from long-finished stories.

I'll admit that I'm part of the FC problem, partly because I don't read all that many stories in the first place (being a very slow reader) and partly because I prefer stories with canon or partly-canon casts. For both of those reasons, I have traditionally been less interested in FC than in any other Feature. I personally wouldn't miss it, but that's just me.

The only danger I can see from opening nominations is that "vintage" characters from stories finished years ago may come to dominate because the newer characters (and their stories) have no audience.