We've addressed this type of query before, but at the risk of repetition, we'll explain once more.
Question of the Day has been running since May 1, 2005 and on average we receive between four and a dozen new queries per day. My old email account has a stockpile of something like 25,000 questions in it -- I don't check it that often as it crashes my machine! Since we switched to a new email provider a couple of years ago, I've accumulated another 4,194 questions.
As the name of the feature implies, we address one question per day. There are 365 days in most years, and each month four of the QoD slots are taken up by running our twice-monthly Reader Polls, and their results and email feedback, leaving approximately 317 available Question of the Day spots. So, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math and realize that you can't fit 30,000 QoDs into 317 holes.
We select those questions we do answer based on numerous criteria, including: topicality; the need for variety and balance; availability of information; an estimation of how long it might take to research the answer; whether or not the query has been addressed before and, if so, how recently; how broad of an appeal the topic may have; and other factors, including if it interests us enough to research and write!
You can't please all the people all of the time, but we receive daily fan mail and thanks from QoD readers that seems to indicate most QoD readers are happy with the feature. There's no one holding a gun to anyone's head to make them read something they don't care about and we often find that what sounds like a dull subject at first glance actually proves to be fascinating, once we dig in to it.
We do keep all the questions we get, unless the subject has already been done to death or is just too obscure or niche or completely irrelevant to Las Vegas or gambling to warrant consideration, and we prioritize the best of them -- topical; informative; never been asked before; intriguing; etc -- to answer first. Often it just takes a long while to find sufficient time to dig up all the relevant information, or we find ourselves waiting on a crucial source's availability/willingness to get back to us, so please be patient and, as was the case with yesterday's query which the same person had submitted on no less than four occasions, eventually patience often pays off.
