If you ask me, “featured” should be renamed to “latest”. It makes more sense then “featured” which is more of a vague term here, because what is featured.
Latest makes more sense, it shows the pinned and latest topics (tho it should remove the pin if read, like in latest, does it?) and this would be the expected behavior for such this option IMO.
Good catch.
What would make these more clear to me are the following changes:
- categories with featured topics > categories with latest topics
- categories and latest topics > category list and latest topics
The differences between with/and are clear to me, and can be learned quickly by try-and-error.
The key confusion here, is that “featured” is referring to “3 (or 4?) latest topics” while it implies “top” topics.