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Currently there are three posts tagged “featured” on Meta.SE but only two appear in Featured on Meta. For example, on EL&U (English Language & Usage) we see "Thank you, Roberto Cartaino" and “Change in roles for Jon Ericson (leaving SE)” but not the slightly older featured post: “Thank you, Shog9”.

I am sure many users who were on holiday during the festive season will be still unaware that Shog9 is no longer working as a community manager on Stack Exchange.

for description see above

  1. How many days did @Mithical's post thanking Shog9 for his support, work and dedication to SE appear in the announcement box?
  2. Why is the "Featured" limit fixed at two?
  3. In the future, would it be possible to have three announcements rotate for, let's say, three weeks?

Somewhat related, a feature request of mine proposing a drop-down menu
Can we have a drop-down menu for "Featured on Meta"?

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  • Not sure what you ask here. Title asks "when", answer to which is "when there are two newer featured questions", and in the body you ask "Why is it set on 2". Please clarify what you want to ask or discuss. (If asking only "when" it's dupe of this, otherwise not sure the reasoning behind only two was discussed before.)
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Jan 26, 2020 at 10:12
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    @Shadow9 the title asks 1. When is a featured post not featured in the Featured on Meta box. The post still has the featured tag. 2 How long did the slightly older post appeared in the CB box (barely an entire day older, I would understand if it had been a week or two), 3. Why there can only be two Featured posts, which is strongly related to the title, and 4. offers two possible solutions in the future.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jan 26, 2020 at 10:16
  • Sorry can't see a focused request. Anyway, to answer #2 - it was featured until Jon's departure has been featured, the sort is by the time the question has been featured, as far as I can tell.
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Jan 26, 2020 at 11:23
  • Mari-LouA, this (number of featured, and differences between sites) was discussed in The Tavern recently, and continued until here.
    – Rob
    Jan 26, 2020 at 11:30
  • Uh. There's a maximum of 2. Choosing was too damned hard. Adding the post to featured also adds it to the FAQ for meta/
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jan 26, 2020 at 11:39
  • @JourneymanGeek I'll accept it as an answer, if you could also say how long the post was featured in the Community Bulletin box, and if a drop-down list can be introduced. Thank you.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jan 26, 2020 at 11:46
  • @Shadow9 can't see a focused request. maybe because it's not a FR to start off with? I wasn't aware that more than two posts can be tagged featured at the same time and it seems wrong that one post gets knocked off because a few hours later another post earned the featured tag.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jan 26, 2020 at 11:50
  • Agree, my issue is with lack of focus in the question, making it too broad/unclear. For example, I'll support a request to rotate the featured questions showing in the side bar when there are more than two, but what answer can I give now?
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Jan 26, 2020 at 11:55
  • @Shadow9 then post an answer on the actual FR meta.stackexchange.com/questions/332719/…. I can edit the FR and include that proposal too, if you prefer.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jan 26, 2020 at 12:05
  • @Mari-LouA I don't really remember.Its been a bit of a trying time.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jan 26, 2020 at 12:12
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    When we still had Hot Meta Posts on SO, those were selected "randomly". You would expect it does the same here when there are more candidates then slots available. The code is there, only needs to be hooked up to the Featured pool.
    – rene
    Jan 26, 2020 at 12:38

2 Answers 2

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Dates and times when each post was tagged

  1. “Thank you, Shog9": Jan 13 at 22:03
  2. “Thank you, Robert Cartaino”: Jan 14 at 8:28
  3. “Change in roles for Jon Ericson (leaving SE)”: Jan 18 at 9:41

It appears the first post stopped appearing in Community Bulletin after January 18, 2020. A total of four days, give or take. Only two posts can appear simultaneously in the Bulletin board. From here

Additionally, up to 2 posts from Meta Stack Exchange will appear in the community bulletins of all main sites (but no child meta sites). These are also labeled "meta". Note that these will appear in addition to all of the other stuff listed above, so the list of community bulletin posts might appear longer than usual, depending on the individual site circumstances.

This suggests that the second post, which was tagged only ten hours later, has been featured uninterrupted in the Featured on Meta, once known as the Community Bulletin, ever since. I believe all three announcements deserve to be featured and all three notices should be on display across the entire network for an equal amount of time. The best and fairest solution would be a rotation between the three posts until a fixed number of days or weeks have lapsed, when the oldest announcement loses its featured tag and is replaced by a newer post.

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  • For extra fun, they are heavily cached so... I can't manually rotate them either. I'd frankly just not need posts about losing well loved members of the company/community.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jan 26, 2020 at 13:00
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    @JourneymanGeek no one likes to receive sad news but it's important as many users as possible know the current situation concerning SE's longest serving employees. I'm just saying that all 3 deserve equal space, I would have bumped the oldest of the 3 posts and given it another week on the bulletin.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jan 26, 2020 at 13:07
  • A month after you posted this, the team temporarily bumped the maximum number to three for a small amount of time. Which means that if it's truly needed, the team has the technical ability to feature three posts.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    May 29, 2021 at 7:55
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Maybe we should permanently increase the number of featured posts to like 10. It's not like there are cases where we don't want everyone to see a post marked with a tag that literally means "We want everybody to see this".

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