As some of the last posters have said, some of you are taking the “Featured Thread” aspect of this site way too seriously. Obviously I like CC a lot and think it is a very valuable web site, but it isn’t the New York Times and doesn’t purport to be. And even the NYT “features” things that are of little interest to most of their readership. I can’t remember if I said it here or elsewhere, but I have seen major city newspapers (print editions, where space actually has even more value) feature teasers above the headlines on Sunday where they direct people to check out the article in Section H that describes a honeybee exhibit at the zoo or or the latest observations by scientists regarding shifting tectonic plates or the latest in lawn mower technology. I would wager that well less than half the readership actually has a real interest in those topics. But they feature them anyway. Would I expect people to write a letter to the editor every time that happens because they feel the paper is featuring trivial articles of little interest to the majority of their readership? No, they skip reading that section or that article. And they actually paid for that paper! Sigh.
Besides, I think we all have pretty good guesses where the brightest students tend to go to college. But certainly if someone has a tabulation of something like that and the results were surprising and interesting, there should be a thread about it and it should be featured. But absent such an article or study, what are we supposed to post? We are not a news gathering organization. It’s all well and good to say we don’t feature threads about where IMO/USBMO winners go to school, but is there such a thread? Is there an article out there about that topic? I just put USBMO into the CC search engine and got 3 (THREE!!!) hits total. For the entire site. I don’t even know what USBMO is, frankly, but I am assuming it is a prestigious award of some kind. Whatever it is, members don’t seem to be talking about it much, so I would really wonder about the interest level of that subject. Remember, you all create 99.9% of the threads on this site.
I think there was a featured article about a year ago, maybe two (time goes by so fast) that did talk about Siemens winners or something similar choosing Stanford over other schools. It has been awhile and I might have the details wrong, but those things are not ignored. There is nothing wrong with the occasional light thread mixed in with all the serious stuff.