In looking into it it appears that the TopicImage might be controlled by a ascx file? It was hard to identify which. I guess I would like to know how easy it would be to implement something like this? Clearly there is some sort of control that chooses an image based on view count and post count.

Just hoping for a bit of direction of how it might work, but i'm also open to examples of it being implemented. In doing some google foo I did notice there was a Russian fork of YAF that implemented something similar to this