Just off the top of my head:
- posts with the largest number of quotes in the past d days
- posts with the largest number of likes in the past d days
... or a combination of the above (for example, posts that have been quoted a lot but have also received at least one like). Of course, using likes as a criterion would make this feature dependent on the likes extension.
If you wanted to do "Featured Discussions" instead of "Featured Posts", you could list:
- discussions with the largest number of replies in the past d days
- discussions with the largest number of views in the past d days
... or a combination of the above (for example, since a discussion may have been viewed a lot simply because it has a provocative title, you may want to limit the list to discussions that have received at least x replies). I guess this sort of thing could be a good reason for tracking the number times a discussion is viewed...
I get the feeling that [deleted] is talking about allowing moderators to choose posts manually. This could be done by adding a featured_post log that would store the post number and a timestamp when the admin or moderator sets the "featured post" flag for a given post. The "featured posts" module on the front page would display a list of the most recent records.
You would need a way to delete featured_post records from the log, to allow moderators to "unfeature" posts that have been featured by mistake. But there'd be no need to do anything about posts that have been crowded out of the lists by more recent entries; in fact, leaving that data in the database would give users a way to search for a complete list of posts that have been featured in the past.
