[quote=Lillian Thorne]
 I've even handed control of a few of them over to players who acted as co-GMs a time or two in the infancy of my GMing. [/quote]
I've tried this out for the first time in the roleplay I'm running and so far it has worked wonderfully. It helps take off the load of keeping track of all the NPCs as well as let certain NPCs be played in a different manner.

[quote=Lillian Thorne]
Then there are the ones that are a little more cardboard-y. The baker who is around the corner who warrants a name but not much more. I make lists of these so that there is coherency and that if for whatever reason the baker needs to become more important we know a name and some little things about them.[/quote]
I'll have to keep that in mind. I've done this with more important NPCs but adding to the list with names and short blurbs of who they are a minor NPC is would come in handy granted that I have a ton of NPCs in that roleplay so I'll probably have to find a way to somehow limit it.

[quote=Lord Wraith]
Sometimes I even write whole posts from the perspective of the NPC, it's fun sometimes to describe your character through someone else's eyes. That said I predominately play Superhuman RPs and thus this all works very well for that particular genre. [/quote]
With a decent chunk of the first part of the roleplay focused on uncovering the NPC's past, I have done this (maybe a little too much) so that the roleplayers can learn about what is going on or what is to come. From what I've seen it's been a great way to set the mood of a roleplay or an arc.

[quote=Arsenal]
I never really put much thought into NPCs; usually I operated under the "name/nameless" rules for NPCs. In general, if any given NPC is referred to by a name, as in "Bob" rather than just "the waiter", then that NPC is at least important enough to give priority (but not necessarily absolute) control to whoever introduced that NPC, or the GM in charge of the RP, whichever is best for the situation. Conversely, if somebody introduces an NPC without giving them a name, then that NPC is probably unimportant enough that everyone involved in the RP can dictate their actions and reactions moderately freely. [/quote]
Like BW said, I haven't gone with the idea that a name would distinguish if the NPC could be used by roleplayers or not. I do give limited control of NPCs on a varying degrees based on importance though on a case by case situation. Implementing something more clearer like this might be something I will have to look into.

As for NPCs versus secondary characters , I have been guilty of being between the lines of the two and the lines can be challenging to distinguish at times even harder so when a group of NPCs were the main characters of a previous story and now that I turned that story into a roleplay set years later it has been hard to shove them into a box labeled NPC when there is a lot of history about them.