For Discussion boards in SharePoint 2013, the Moderation tab on the Ribbon allows administrators to mark/unmark threads as featured. This tab appears when you switch to the Management view of the discussion board.

For a particular site I was working on, this tab would not show. It turned out that this was because the Team Collaboration Lists feature was not activated for the web. Activate this feature and the tab appears as expected.

As you know the Team Collaboration Lists feature enables users to create a number of different types of lists, e.g. discussion board, announcements, contacts, calendar, etc. So how was it possible that I had an instance of the discussion board created but the feature was not activated?

Well, this could happen under two scenarios: 1) the list was created by code, in which case the feature does not need to be activated – and 2) an administrator has disabled the feature after the list was created, which may occur if one wants to control the type/number of lists being created by power users.