How WebsiteHot works

Sources & coverage

• Hacker News: Show HN posts with more than three points. Site pages can also include older stories linking to the same domain.
• Lobsters: Recent stories tagged “show”, drawn from the two most recent pages.
• GitHub: Recently created repositories with more than 30 stars and a homepage link. A repository’s creation date is not necessarily its website’s launch date.
• Manual submissions: Websites approved by an editor. They remain searchable and keep their own page after leaving the recent rankings.

Right now covers community activity from the last 48 hours; This week covers seven days; category pages cover 30 days. Keyword search includes older Show HN results, recent GitHub and Lobsters launches, and manually listed sites. Source limits mean this is a sample, not an exhaustive directory.

“First seen” is the earliest source date we have, or the first manual publication date. It is not proof of when a website launched. Public rankings are cached and refreshed on demand, usually hourly. If an upstream service fails, a ranking may keep its last successful result; search marks unavailable sources explicitly.

The saved directory keeps collected community websites and approved submissions beyond these windows. It starts from observations collected by WebsiteHot, not a complete historical import. Collection normally runs once per UTC day after a successful scheduled website check, with retries for unavailable sources. Source limits and collection bounds can leave gaps.

Saved activity is labeled separately from live discovery. A source’s earliest post date and the date we actually saved it are different. Each domain retains up to ten recent posts per source; daily source samples are kept for 90 days, with the latest two weeks shown on its page. Collection attempts are limited to three per UTC day. Samples count the retrieved posts from a rolling 30-day collection window. Missing samples are not zero votes, and differences do not prove traffic growth. Saving a site does not check that it is still online.

Heat measures attention, not quality

Heat is a 0–99° summary of retrieved community activity. It is not a review score, a security check, a traffic estimate, or a count of WebsiteHot votes.

For each post, weighted points plus 0.5 per comment are divided by (age in hours + 2) raised to 0.8. Negative activity counts do not add heat. We sum posts by domain, then convert the score using 100 × score / (score + 8), capped at 99°.

The weights are an editorial approximation, not an equivalence between communities. Older attention fades. Manually listing a website adds no popularity points. Editor’s picks are labeled and can appear ahead of the heat order. Search can use a different set of posts, so its heat may differ from a recent ranking.

What we review

Submit a working website on its own domain, made by you or your team, with a factual name and one-line description. It should be something people can use or play now. We exclude adult content, gambling, scams, link farms and placeholder waitlists.

Submissions wait for a manual decision. Approval creates a listing, but does not guarantee placement at the top of a ranking or verify ownership, safety or every claim a maker makes. Shared domains such as GitHub, YouTube and app stores are not ranked as one website; use the project’s own domain.

Your submission email stays private and is used if we need to contact you about the listing. Automated approval emails and self-service claiming are not available yet. Featured paid listings are also not available.