I would like to request a change in the way the -former parameter works in featured.py. Currently if you specify -former, it looks for a category for former featured articles in a wiki, and then follows the same procedure it normally does with finding interwikis to your language, etc etc. This is not the way it should work. Instead, it should do this:

1. Find occurences of {{Link FA}} in your wiki, then check if the article in the language specified is in the designated category/has the designated template/whatever. For example, if you go to [[no:Sverige]] and it says {{Link FA|ru}}, it should go to the Russian Wikipedia and check whether or not [[ru:Швеция]] contains the template [[ru:Шаблон:Избранная статья]] (or whatever it checks for, that is already specified). 2. If it is in the right category/has the right template/whatever, then do nothing; 3. If it is not in the right category/is missing the template/whatever, remove the {{Link FA}}.

This would be much better because:

1. the bot would only focus on the articles it needs to focus on (doesn't check hundreds of articles that do not exist in your language), 2. the bot could check several languages at the same time (for articles that are featured in many many languages, like [[Esperanto]]), 3. it does not rely on a wiki actually having a category for former featured articles (many wikis don't), which is a huge weakness in the current model.

So if anybody is able to fix this, that would be great. Sadly I don't know how to do it myself (if I did I would have).