Stack Exchange Statistics Explorer API

Versions

General

The Stack Exchange Statistics Explorer API is provided to help facilitate the integration of statistics for Stack Exchange sites into other applications. All data provided by this API unless otherwise noted is still property of Stack Exchange, and as such any use of it is subject to the Stack Exchange API terms of use.

The number one concern of all developers when reviewing API documentation is price, and the rate-limits. Currently, there are no prices or rate-limits on the API, however that is subject to change if it begins to be abused. Data changes once a day which means that websites using this API should cache aggressively. Data is updated in the API at 00:30:00UTC+00:00 plus or minus several minutes.

Rate Limiting

The API is not currently rate-limited, however, if any abuse of it is noted then access to the API for the caller (or anyone for that matter) may be cutoff. There may be a rate-limit imposed at any time and this may be done with or without prior notice. All callers should expect to be subject to a rate limit and follow all expected procedures. (Acknowledge any backoff request, follow any quota limits, etc.)

Site Renames / Merges

On occasion Stack Exchange is known for renaming sites. (In 2016 two of these happened that affected us: beer -> alcohol, and programmers -> softwareengineering.) Unfortunately, this is a difficult problem for us to solve as it requires us to decide: do we fail that API request, do we return the new site data, do we return no data, or do we return data up to the merge point?

In this case we made the decision to return all data for both requests. If you make a request for the data for programmers and softwareengineering, you will see that both requests will return the same history data. (If the request is for the site information itself, it will return the information for that site.)