How to work out what's “trending” on site I have no access too

Question

On a forum I'm on there's a news section where members post news. Every day it seems there is articles about Apple and someone made a petition to have apple articles removed as it's the same stories day in day out. Each forum section has an RSS feed.

That got me thinking that it would be cool to see what news stories were trending that day on the site, but I am stuck as I don't have ANY access to the database or back end as I'm a normal user. Can anyone think of a way that I could achieve this?

I have a server that I could host the results on.

Answer 1

Does the site have a API or rss feed?

If not you can only read the content with permissions of the site owner using file_get_contents($url).