Cant anybody request a thread to be featured or defeatured? You go to the first post of a thread, click the "report" button, and in the drop-down menu of options choose Move/Feature/Defeature. Add which of the three you're suggesting.
There's probably no guarantee they will follow your suggestion, but I'm sure they'd be happy to get your input.
I guess their main problem with the featuring business is keeping up, so there's no outdated threads featured. If there's a poster who's taken it on him/herself, upon suggestion by the moderators, to do the featuring/defeaturing for a certain forum, then there will always be new threads featured. But I am guessing that for many forums they just dont have someone doing that.
(I was asked to do it for International News once upon a time, but I flaked out very quickly...)
why does it matter if something is featured?
I guess, if it's a busy forum, it helps to keep an interesting or thought-provoking thread from getting washed down to the bottom of the list or backpages by the everyday wash of hohum threads.
Sometimes, when I'm lazy, when I go to a forum I just look at the top 10 threads, the featured ones, not gonna read down the whole list.. so I guess I can see why its useful to highlight the most valuable new threads up there.
On some other forums they have a Recommend function or the like, and the new thread recommended by the most posters gets listed on top...
Shewolf and nimh are right.
We feature topics that we feel will be of interest to our membership. Absent input from the membership, we guess as to what we think will be of interest. Don't like what we've selected? Then click "report" and suggest something. We're happy to take input but we're not automatons. We don't just automatically feature everything simply because it was requested. But yeah, you can request that your own stuff be featured. We won't think any less of you, although we may point and giggle, but we do that anyway.
Well we point and giggle at you guys, too, so we're even.
And I echo Shewolf's question. Who cares, anyway? People will read it if it's interesting (or if there's a fight in progress!)
