Q:

How are the "Featured Users" on StackExchange.com chosen?

Or rather, why does Jin appear three times there, just because he posted the design concepts for each of the graduating StackExchange sites on their respective Metas? 

Edit: Meh, I just realized this only happens if I use that [design] tag set I created to keep track of the new designs popping up for each of the new sites... which makes a lot more sense now. Still, it'll be interesting to know how these users are "chosen" 

A:

On the "Hot Questions" page, we pick the top answerers from the questions featured on the page.
On the "Tag Sets" page, we show the askers because storing answer information for all of those questions (all questions in the last 3-4 weeks) is too much.
We de-dupe the users to make sure they only show up once, but it's association-naive right now, so it could theoretically show Jin once for every single site he's on.
I'll look into how hard it would be to check the association id when we de-dupe the users.
Also, Jin's a really nice guy, and he deserves all the recognition he can get :)

