User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: January 7, 2014/@comment-188432-20140110205517

Thanks for fixing forum highlighting expiration. This at least will ensure people aren't terribly overwhelmed by new messages when they come to your wiki for the first time.

Still, I don't think we should quite call it a day. As Wall Forum matures, I think you should look into:


 * Keeping automatic, 7-day expiration as the default, but giving admin local power to turn off automatic expiration. Some issues will be important to a community for more than seven days, and giving local admin the power to "unhighlight all" gives useful autonomy to local wikis. Allowing communities to go with either timed un-highlighting or a "master reset button" would probably make more communities happier.
 * Creating some page which shows you all current highlights. One of the issues I had when the automatic expire wasn't working was in trying to remember what threads were highlighted. As our highlight list expanded well beyond the 25-message mark, I had no reasonable way to figure out what was highlighted and what not.  Presumably it would be fairly easy to code a Special:HighlightedPages page, since you'd only have to pick up on the presence of a flagged state.