WHADDAYA GOTTA DO TO EARN A "GOLD STAR?"

This topic has come up a lot lately.  Caleb, me (and soon a few others) choose by hand the posts that will get a gold star and be featured.  Yes, because it's done by hand it can be fairly subjective, and it's very hard to do because there are SO many good posts each day and we can't feature them all.

Sometimes I have a certain theme I like to run on.  Sometimes we get so many great posts on a single topic I can only feature a couple of them, so we get a variety of topics.  If it's a controversial topic I try to highlight different view points.  Also I tend to try to feature posts from new members as much as possible. 

I will admit how a post looks and whether it is free from spelling mistakes can make a huge difference as there is so much to read I tend to browse over posts and only read certain ones in depth.  If a post is getting a lot of comments or being rated highly it will often catch my attention.

So in short there isn't a hard rule on what gets featured.  There are A LOT of great posts that don't get featured.