I searched and searched and could not find the definition of a “featured topic”. In particular, I am wondering how the featured topics are selected for the category view when you have “Categories with featured topics” selected for the desktop category page view.
The last (n) topics with latest replies. I agree the text describing this is not great, maybe we should change it to “with recent topics”.
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I think it used “featured” because it will show pinned topics that haven’t been unpinned (manually or automatically through reading).
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Thanks for the explanation. Is there any way to select what topics (some or all) are displayed in the category list? Sometimes there are topics that I need to be highlighted and it would a nice way making sure they are noticed.
-N
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Could you expand on the definition/logic of Featured Topics. I am trying to ‘shape’ what posts will appear on my homepage on day 1 (these have been seeded by the admins).
The featured view certainly include the pinned posts but seems to (randomly?) select other non-pinned posts for inclusion ( if no pinned posts are in the category?).
Note I am not trying to add Featured Topics to top of page as per Add a featured topic list to your Discourse homepage. I am simply trying to control what presents under the desktop category page style/Categories with Featured Topics view.
Jeff and Falco detailed the rules above. We’ll first show pinned topics (if there are any for that user), then we show the topics with the most recent replies. There isn’t a good method to curate this, unless you pin a bunch of topics for each category.
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OK, so the distinction between ‘Categories with Featured Topics’ and ‘Categories with Latest Topics’ is that Featured will include Pinned topics? Or are these two configurations doing the same thing just with different format?
Would be nice if there was means to directly sequence the topics in the Featured view, similar to the category sequence ability. Unfortunately, i don’t know how to code. 
No
First, note that the option is ‘Categories and Latest Topics’, not “with”. Categories and Latest Topics is what we have here on Meta. Category list on the left, Latest view on the right. Latest shows all topics from any category, topics listed by those with most recent replies. Same thing you’d see at /latest, just half width.
Categories with Featured Topics shows each category, along with the topics with the most recent replies for that category. Categories with Featured Topics is what this topic is discussing.
A simple example. Say you have 2 categories, 2020 and 2019. No one uses the 2019 category anymore, as it is 2020. So all your recent topics are in the 2020 category. If your desktop category page style was set to “Categories and Latest Topics”, you’d see both categories on the left, and a list of topics from the 2020 category on the right, as they’re the most recent. If your desktop category page style was instead set to “Categories with Featured Topics”, you’d see categories on the left, 3 (by default) topics per category on the right.
Here’s the same site (try) showing both styles.
Categories with Featured Topics:
Categories and Latest Topics:
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