Q:

Questions tagged with favorite tags pop on top of the list

I have noticed that since recently questions that are tagged with favorite tags are popping on the top of the main page (http://stackoverflow.com) even if those questions haven't been modified for a long time. Is this some new feature I didn't understand about? If so how it can be disabled as it is extremely annoying and it completely destroys the usability of the site?
UPDATE:
The issue is even more serious than what I initially thought. Removing my favorite tags doesn't solve it and I continue to see old questions on the home page from my older favorite tags. I really hope someone on the SO team would provide an explanation and fix this horrible bug.

A:

We're measuring a proposed change to the interesting* tab sort order.  This particular experiment will probably be over in a few days, depends how quickly data is gathered.
Note that the new algorithm actually doesn't look at favorite tags, at all.  It's strictly based on your history, though if it works we will probably look at rolling favorite tags in.
The latest version deployed (which I could see being a tad more noticeable than ones running in prior weeks) has been running for a bit, if you think you see it turning on and off you're just seeing the normal random jitters in the homepage.
While the new algorithm doesn't impose a strict activity ordering (at least during testing), the typical window of eligible posts on the homepage hasn't changed (which is 3~4 hours on a weekday).  Caching and activity spikes can play with that a bit in individual cases, but it holds on average.
*There are other possible results, where we don't think it's good enough for the interesting tab but may be useful on some other page/feed.  Ideally it'll be shown to be good enough for the interesting tab though.

