7

Forgive me I did not find the "meta" for the Stack Apps, I believe it is here that I must ask.

I developed an extension for browsers, but I'm not using the Stack Exchange API. Can I post it on Stack Apps?

The extension accesses data from stackexchange.com/topbar/get-unread-counts

Is creating an application without using the API allowed?

Improve this question
1
  • 1
    Stack Apps is Main and Meta at the same time :)
    – brasofilo
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 18:07

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
5

Yes, you can post extensions here that don't use the API. There are several scripts/extensions/apps posted here that use undocumented interfaces(example) or even screen scraping(example).

The extension must make use of the API and/or enhance one or more Stack Exchange sites.

Reference:

  1. Stack Exchange APIs Terms of Use (Still applies, for the most part)
  2. Etiquette of Screen-scraping Stack Overflow?
  3. Stack Exchange Network Terms of Service
  4. Guidelines for the Use of the Stack Exchange Trademarks

You should use the API for your data as much as possible.

This theoretically avoids undocumented changes and staves off the ban-hammer.

In this case, you are fetching unread counts of notifications and inbox items.
There are existing API routes for both:

Ideally you would use these and not that URL. Although it can be quite a bother in this case, since both routes require OAuth and an access_token.
However, the URL might also yield unexpected results if the extension user is not authenticated and depending on how the extension calls it (It mostly reads as all zeroes, falsely, when not called as expected by the server).

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .