How to get the Stack Overflow rank of a user using the Stack Exchange API?

Question

I want to create a React component that fetches data from Stack Overflow of a specific user. I haven't had any issues to get: reputation, answers, badges, etc. using Stack Exchange API v2.3 but I'm having a hard time trying to implement an API that will return the current ranking as shown in this Stack Exchange Data Explorer query and in the Stack Exchange reputation leagues.

Almost 4 years ago a user asked this question without any response. Why is that? Is it impossible?

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 02 '21 at 09:55

This is not possible via the API. You can use two other "tricks", though (both must be done server-side because the sites return CORS headers):

Scrape the /leagues page. Call the endpoint:
```
GET /leagues/1/<type>/<site>/<YYYY-MM-DD>/<userId>
```
(e.g. /leagues/1/quarter/stackoverflow/2021-01-01/10607772), look for the .highlight .number selector and get the inner text. If you want just the number, remember to remove # in the front of the result.

However, the probem is that all league URLs exist in robots.txt, so if you make too many requests, you might be rate-limited.

Fetch the information from Data Explorer. Call:

POST /query/run/<siteId>/<queryId>/97298

(for the query you've linked, the site id is 1 and the query id 6772).

If running exists in the returned JSON and is true, then using job_id call:
```
POST /query/job/<job_id>
```
every 1500 milliseconds (that's what Stack Exchange uses) until resultSets is present in the response.
If not, then look directly for resultSets.

Here's a sample value of that property:

[
    {
        "columns": [
            {
                "name": "Id",
                "type": "Number"
            },
            {
                "name": "Ranking",
                "type": "Number"
            },
            {
                "name": "Percentile",
                "type": "Number"
            }
        ],
        "rows": [
            [
                10607772,
                65137,
                0.0586909706892046
            ]
        ],
        "messagePosition": 0,
        "truncated": false
    }
]

Note that the results are only updated every Sunday. You might get rate-limited as well if you make too many requests in a short time period.

How to get the Stack Overflow rank of a user using the Stack Exchange API?

1 Answers1