"Featured art" is randomly selected by the website upon every page load. It is weighted towards the most favorited submissions. Therefore, the top 100 to 200 favorited submissions show up frequently, and the submissions with less than 10 favorites (bottom of tens of thousands) will probably never show up. 

All members can mark submissions as favorite, so i guess you could say the featured art is chosen democratically. Old submissions have been around longer and have had more time for people to "vote" on them. 

What do you suggest? 

"popular this month" is not disabled by default. It displays on the sidebar even for visitors with no login. Each user has to explicitly disable it in their preferences for it to not show up.

I'm not sure adding one more time-based category would solve the problem. We already display "new", "favorite this week", "favorite this month" and "favorite all time". There is limited front page space, so swapping in a "favorite this year" every once in a while would allow that real estate to be shared. 

Displaying a category showing the most favorited art of all time is important especially for new users who want to know the site's potential. I'm kind of tired of seeing the same spritesheet show up in Featured Art all the time, but honestly they really are great assets; even if it's old news to me, it's a pretty great find for the newbs visiting OGA for the first time.

I do often see more recent submissions in the Featured Art category, but they are rare since new submissions don't often get hundreds of favorites that fast. I am not clear on why this category is a problem, actually. It makes sense to me that the most popular are shown. The fact that many of them are older submissions is a side effect, not the reason they're displayed. There's a ton of old submissions that are honestly pretty terrible, but their age doesn't make them any more likely to be shown.

What is the problem we want to solve? Give more attention to the "middle-aged" artwork? (older than a month, younger than legendary-old-wizard) Maybe we should host a scavenger hunt: everyone looks for art they feel is under-favorited and buried, submits it as their 'diamond in the rough'. Everyone picks the one that really does deserve more love, and brings it the attention it was missing. 

I agree not calling it "all time popular" is a bit of a misnomer for the category, though. I think the fact it is called "featured" instead of "popular of all time" is a hint at a possible solution; Perhaps the category should not be restricted by time, but also not be selected by number of favorties (which tend toward the stuff that's been around longer) but instead a manually curated list. A group volunteers of the most frequent users and submitters select the most useful, game-ready, and gorgeous art in all categories as they are submitted. The "featured" art is then randomly selected from that collection on each page load. 

Problems with that, though:

1. This could become subjective. The art displayed is based on the preferences of the smaller group of volunteers instead of the larger community preferences as a whole.
2. If the collection is not regularly curated, it quickly becomes even more stagnant than "favorites of all time".

Right. Even the curators have to be curated. Feels a bit elitist to me. I'll check into renaming the category to  something more accurate.