site design: hijacked into the bounty section

Question

I was in a normal (no bounty) question, clicked through to a related general question, and clicked on the optimization tag to see other questions with the same tag.
Instead of a list of questions, I arrived to the empty Featured part:

https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/optimization
You are on the Featured tab.

The link looks exactly the same for featured and non-featured filter, this is part of the problem.

This is not the first time I got into Featured without wanting to, and it is quite difficoult to get out. I am not an expert in User Interaction design, but I think clicking on a tag should get me out of the featured context, and show me every question with that tag, with and without a bounty.

The interesting thing is stackoverflow.com works like this, but superuser.com works the way I would prefer. Both use the same stackexchange engine, so I assume this behavior is controlled by a flag in the settings.

Long story short; could we please change it so that clicking on tags of featured questions show all questions with that tag, with or without a bounty?

Stackoverflow.com has nearly 400 featured questions at the moment, it makes sense to be able to filter them with tags.
If I recall correctly, we had 3 at a time at its peak, 0 at the moment.

Answer 1

The current site behavior is that when you switch tabs when browsing tags, the site will remember which tab you were last on amongst newest, frequent, votes, etc. The assumption is that that is your preferred navigation style and so rather than have you switch over each time, it'll just remember.

This causes issue, as has been reported several times in the past, when the featured tab is the one that was last used - it will remember that tab even though the majority of tags will not actually have featured questions. To a technical point, your browsing is not being hijacked but is in fact the system doing its best to not hijack your session and thus leaving all your browsing habits as you last left them.

The ideal goal is that we shouldn't tamper with the user's view preferences when they're browsing. Doing it specifically when the user is on a featured question and clicks any tag, we shouldn't force them onto any tab if they aren't wanting to be on other tabs. For this reason, I have for now marked this request as declined.

---

There's thought that maybe it could be nice that if you are currently defaulting to the featured tab and navigate to a tag that has no such questions (regardless of how you got there), that it should instead force you to, say, newest. That would be less consistent with the rest of the navigation, but it would be less confusing. It's something to think about as an alternative solution.