Trending ranks journals by how many visits they picked up in the last 30 days. The window is rolling, so a journal that was busy six weeks ago and quiet since drops off, while a journal published yesterday that gets read heavily today can appear on the list well before anyone would call it an old favorite.
A journal needs at least one visit in the last 30 days to appear
If nobody has opened a journal's page inside that window, it is left off the list entirely, no matter how many visits it drew before the window opened. Trending is not a static list with an ordering column bolted on. The visit count is both the filter and the ranking: zero recent visits means the journal fails the filter and never reaches the ranking step.
The same exclusions as every other feed apply
Trending draws from the same published set as Editorial, Community, All and Featured, then removes:
- Unlisted journals, even ones with plenty of recent visits.
- Journals whose author has hidden their profile.
- Anything not published. Drafts are never visible outside their author's own view.
Journal feeds explained covers how these same three exclusions apply across all five feeds.
The order updates once an hour, the same for everyone
The ranking is worked out on the server and held for 60 minutes before it is recalculated. Reloading the page inside that hour shows you the same order every time, whether you are signed in or not. A journal that just crossed the visit threshold to qualify can take up to an hour to appear, and one that just dropped below it can take up to an hour to disappear.
Sorting here actually changes the order
On Editorial, Community, All and Featured, choosing Most Popular from the sort control does nothing, because that option is not wired into the server's sort logic there and the list stays in whatever order it already had. Trending is the exception. Its sort options are handled inside the trending endpoint itself rather than the shared one, so each option genuinely reorders the list:
- Most Recent switches to publish date, newest first.
- Most Popular switches to total likes, not visits. This replaces the visit-based ranking rather than adding to it, so the journal on top under Most Popular is not necessarily the one on top under the default Trending order.
- A-Z switches to alphabetical order by title.
- Relevance behaves the same as Most Recent, because a feed has no search term for anything to be relevant to.
Any of these leaves the visit-based order in place only until you pick something else or reload /journals/trending without a sort applied.
If a journal you expected isn't showing up
Check three things: whether it has had a visit in the last 30 days, whether it is unlisted, and whether its author's profile is hidden. Those are the only reasons a published journal drops out of Trending.