It is completely random, but only picks from users who were recently online and have a converted HA. But there are still a few users who meet that criteria and walk around naked, so the algorithm has a chance to pick them.

So it's not a contest and it's not like the pet spotlight where you have to enter and be judged. It just shows a random user's HA.

We don't really mind having it somewhere that logged in users can see, but we don't know where it would go. We do not want to put it on the news sidebar because that's already filled with important links and the news page is already a bit cluttered. It would make sense in the forums, since it's a community-related thing, but I can't think of anywhere it would actually fit into the page layout if that makes sense.