I'd also appreciate the ability to star an article. In my case, I rarely want to persist the star for long, I just want to mark it for later reading so it doesn't get lost. I realise I can Evernote or Pocket articles, but a very lightweight system like starring is preferable - less is more. At the moment, I just "Like" to indicate I want to read it later, and "Unlike" when I'm done with it. It works for me, but perhaps misleading for others.

I would like the ability to just archive off posts that are star. I use this as a searchable flag that I later go back sometimes months or years after reading a post to find an article, product etc..

I don't think Pocket is a replacement for starring/favouriting an item. I use Pocket to mark things to be able to read them on different devices, then I remove it from Pocket once it's read. But starring entries in my email or in Google Reader is like a browser bookmark for something I will come back to on multiple occasions. (Besides, what if Pocket closes down?)

Star and pocket is not exactly the same,
Pocket allow me to read article later, but starred article/entries are also subject to others interactions (sharing and liking for example)

All for star and probably allow a RSS feed of the starred items.! :D

A decent alternative for me could be having a "pocketed" folder just like the "liked" one

Yeah, the problem is I have to come back to theoldreader and actually search articles I liked to set the "Like" flag.

I'm going to give Pocket a try starting today, but it was always nice to know that all my news reading was done in gReader. And that if I needed to look something up, whether I starred it or shared it, I could find it there.

We used to have a Star feature, but we deprecated it in favor of Pocket integration.