Last time guys.
Poll of the Week Feedback. Not section feedback. I will open a section feedback eventually, after I deal with this situation though, rest assured. And that announcement will have to go up tomorrow, I'm simply too busy right now. =/
I found it to be Poll of the Week Feedback. Such would be more popular if people felt more comfortable in this section as a whole. The polls of the week, great as they are, aren't going to go very far if every member just comes in and posts their one opinion and then leaves. For it to truly come to life, people are going to have actually get behind the whole "chit-chat" of the topic of the POTW.
That being said.... you also have to realize that the POTW are the ones that people enjoyed and thus have already replied to, only exacerbating the effect that I mentioned earlier. The POTW will bring popularity to this section, but so too is it this section's job to bring popularity to the POTW. They are interdependent, and in most cases that I see, bettering one will bring betterment to the other as well.
I think the candidate number is rather silly thing. The number of candidates seems irrelevant to me. I don't think that you really need to make the candidate feel important... And on a weekly basis, this seems as though it might be a little difficult. I don't know how many new threads you get weekly, but I imagine that it can't be very much more than 10. In that regard, I could see the program being relatively useless when EVERYONE is a candidate, but so long as enough new threads come through, it won't be a problem. Alternatively, you could a bi-weekly event or perhaps a monthly one, allowing more threads to come in, and thus generating a bigger pool to select the candidates from. The number then, could be bigger, while still retaining this "special" sense that you wish to have. If it were up to me, however, I wouldn't care about the candidates feeling special, because it's an achievement in its own right to be selected as 1 of the 5 or 1 of the 10 out of all these new threads. And honestly, at this point, they really haven't won, and it is the winner that truly deserves to be hailed.
Also... you know... this could be for section feedback. Just because you are too busy to carry it out now, does not mean you cannot generate the ideas and pin them up for later use.