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Stack Overflow needs a Stack Exchange key on the deployment — a quota question rather than an access one: an unauthenticated caller gets 300 requests a day, and a key (free, no OAuth flow) raises it to 10 000. On Nephia’s hosted API it is configured; if you self-host, register at stackapps.com and set STACKEXCHANGE_KEY. GET /account reports which Sources a deployment offers in capabilities.liveSources.

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The item

A Stack Overflow Watch emits a StackItem, and type says which kind it is: question or answer. Both ride one entity, exactly as Hacker News’ items do — because on this Source the answers are usually the news. A product is asked about once and answered about ten times, and a Source that returned only questions would miss where the conversation is. title is the question’s title on both types. That is what the endpoint returns, and it is what places an answer for a reader. id is kind-prefixed — question-79998735, answer-79998810 — because the two share a numeric id space. score is this item’s own — an answer’s score, not its question’s. questionScore is the thread’s, on both types. author comes from a response filter Nephia asks for explicitly. The API’s default filter on this endpoint returns no owner at all.

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Coverage

A Watch requires a search term. Tags narrow a search here but they do not scope one, so a Watch with no term would mean “every question on Stack Overflow”. Tags are lowercased and ANDed: every result carries all of them. A reader writes TypeScript, Node.js and gets typescript + node.js. Stack Overflow only. The other 180-odd Stack Exchange sites are one parameter away and are not covered yet. One term only. The site’s search ANDs every word it is given, so an OR would silently return nothing — the same behaviour Hacker News’ and Bluesky’s searches have. A quoted phrase is honoured, so match: "word" asks for it upstream.

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The index is not realtime

/search/excerpts reads an index that lags: a question can be asked a few minutes before it becomes searchable. That is a property of the Source, not a bug we can poll our way around, and it is why the five-minute floor is a floor rather than a promise of five-minute latency. Nephia handles it rather than ignoring it: each tick narrows by the newest creation time it has seen and diffs against the ids it saw, so an item indexed late still arrives exactly once instead of being skipped by the time cutoff. Interval: 300–86400 seconds. Cap: 20 active Watches per Account. Each tick costs 1 credit. The floor is arithmetic: twenty Watches at 300 s is 5 760 requests a day, under the 10 000 a key allows, with room for Explore runs on the same key. A two-minute floor would be 14 400 — over the ceiling, and the failure mode is a throttle for every user of the Source at once.

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What an event carries

The first tick establishes a silent baseline and emits nothing. Later ticks emit stack_item.created. webhook_url is optional — without it the Watch still records every match, readable through GET /v1/stackoverflow/watches/{id}/events. See Webhooks.
A common shape — unanswered questions about your product — is a Watch plus one rule: stackItem.type = question and stackItem.answers = 0.

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Errors

A temporary Stack Exchange failure is 503 and is not charged; the Watch reports it in its activity, readable through GET /v1/stackoverflow/watches/{id}/activity. A throttle answers 429 and is not charged either. A deployment with no STACKEXCHANGE_KEY answers 503 on these routes and omits stackoverflow from capabilities.liveSources.