How WorldTopHub collects rankings

What you can compare

WorldTopHub brings together rankings across news, technology, entertainment, shopping and communities. Each source measures popularity differently. A view count, a community vote and a sales position are not interchangeable scores.

Source rankings and attribution

Source pages preserve the order supplied by the listed provider. They link to the original ranking and to the original entries. Numeric metrics appear only when supplied by the source. Some rankings come through third-party providers; the explanation on each source page identifies these cases.

What each board’s order means

Not every published order is a popularity chart. Each board carries a label naming the kind of order it is, shown on the card, on the source page and in the data we serve:

• Source ranking — the publisher’s own popularity ranking of its own work.
• Forum threads — a forum’s ordering of its own users’ threads. It measures discussion in that forum, not the popularity of published work.
• Editor’s picks — articles the publisher selected and ordered itself.
• Daily column — a dated column a publisher issues, in the order it issued it.
• Latest news — the publisher’s own running list of what it most recently published. It is not a ranking and is never treated as one.

Four of these name an order the publisher released. The fifth does not: a Latest news board is the publisher’s own running list, carried with that label so it is never read as a chart, and kept out of Hot and Topics because those views compare publishers’ rankings with each other. What none of the five permits is us inventing an order — a source whose page would have to be read off dates, or a feed we merely found, stays unavailable and empty rather than falling back to whatever the page happens to list first.

Updates and delayed data

The displayed collection time records when a ranking was retrieved. A source publication time, where available, describes the provider’s snapshot. Collection time does not mean that an article was published or changed at that time. When collection fails, the last available ranking can remain visible with an update-delay label.

Daily snapshots

Saved rankings let you revisit an earlier day. Archive dates use Beijing time (UTC+8), and coverage depends on successful collection. An empty date does not mean that the source published nothing.

Combined views

Hot and Topics are views calculated by WorldTopHub. They merge the positions published by the boards listed above, so a forum thread list and a publisher’s own chart can appear together, and each entry names every board it appeared on with the heat text that board published. Neither view is a ranking any source released, and neither is a publisher’s own chart.

Check an entry

Use “Original source” on a ranking page to verify its order and reporting period. Follow an entry’s link for its full content and the publisher’s corrections.