As discussed on fairpm/fair-plugin#333 (where I veered off on a tangent because I thought I was answering a question about how .org does it)
AC never got around to implementing "Featured" because it's apparently a totally opaque manual process at .org of marking a plugin as featured. The implementation that does exist is to sort by rating descending ... and that's it. The rest is DB natural sort order, which means it's effectively whatever is oldest in AspireSync's rotation.
When AC's only client was AspireUpdate, AU just disabled the "featured" tab, so it was forgotten about. But when it's the default screen on the plugin browser, that's kind of a problem. I still don't want to get into the editorial game of picking winners, but maybe we can make the algorithm a variant of "Popular", perhaps with a stronger bias toward recent updates, which would make "Hot" the more apt description.
As discussed on fairpm/fair-plugin#333 (where I veered off on a tangent because I thought I was answering a question about how .org does it)
AC never got around to implementing "Featured" because it's apparently a totally opaque manual process at .org of marking a plugin as featured. The implementation that does exist is to sort by rating descending ... and that's it. The rest is DB natural sort order, which means it's effectively whatever is oldest in AspireSync's rotation.
When AC's only client was AspireUpdate, AU just disabled the "featured" tab, so it was forgotten about. But when it's the default screen on the plugin browser, that's kind of a problem. I still don't want to get into the editorial game of picking winners, but maybe we can make the algorithm a variant of "Popular", perhaps with a stronger bias toward recent updates, which would make "Hot" the more apt description.