How to Monitoring Trending Posts?

I’m already using the API to monitor on an hourly basis my topics using various methods. I realized much of my best content is nested within these topics and I want to expose it elsewhere. So I want monitor my top posts now.

I see the latest posts API call, however I’m assuming that this only returns the last 30 new posts and that activity like likes does not bump the post in this list. That means I may observe a post when it’s created and have zero likes, and then three hours later, not be aware that it has accumulated 30 likes and is strongly trending.

Any suggestions on how to monitor this? With topics it was easier because new posts were presumably bumping them to latest.

I’m imagining things like periodically querying on each individual post to update its stats, but this doesn’t seem scalable. Or periodically paginate through all the latest posts for the past day or two, which would allow me to “check in on” how some of those posts are doing after some hours have passed. But this would ignore a post’s performance improvements once it was older than said timeframe (assuming latest is ordered by post creation date). None of these seem ideal.

You might be able to get some useful data by monitoring the daily and weekly top topics routes. Top topics are calculated based on views, likes, and reply count. Daily top topics are recalculated once every hour. Weekly top topics are only recalculated once per day, so there would be no point in querying the route more often than that.

The best way to get the exact data you are looking for would be to write a Data Explorer query and then run the query through the API. On our hosting, the Data Explorer plugin is available on the Business plan.

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