There are a number of ways that we could improve our currently handling of Favorites (Stars) to make them more useful for the community. Right now, the problem is that Favoriting a story also means 'following' it for update purposes, which can make it problematic to have more than a couple if you pay attention to your Favorites feed. Part of the trouble there is also that you can't just see a list of your favorites to track one story, and then move to another that's been updating when you're ready. You're locked into chronological view-everything (and even see comments updates for games you can't see comments in!)

There are 3 changes I'd recommend to improve the Favoriting system:

1. Separate Favorites from 'Following' (or 'Subscribed'). This allows readers to star a game, essentially 'liking' it as a signal that it's a good story, a nod of approval for the narrator and the players, but without adding it to the things they receive updates for. Following would be separate, and purely for that particular member's use.

2. Provide each member a page to view a listing of games they're Following, and also a list of Favorites. This gives even more utility to the 'starring' process, since you can say 'this is interesting but I don't want to read it right now; I'll come back to it later.' A list of Followed stories allows a user to quickly catch up on one specific story without muddling through a chronological feed of updates for anything related to that one. It's an ease-of-life feature, but a very important one for encouraging readership (bonus: a list of Favorites would be incredibly useful to those volunteers who are picking Featured games; they'd have a list they can keep going back to for nominations and selections, check in on their progress over time, etc.)

3. Allow us a way to toggle email notifications for Followed stories! Ideally, there would be two options (well, three including 'no email notifications,' as usual): an immediate notification, as is sent to a player; and a daily digest sort of email that summarizes activity in all Followed stories the member has.