General PHP API help

Hi!
I’m trying to use the Patreon API to do 2 things:

  1. Verify if someone is a patron of that campaign
  2. Display a list of my campaigns Patrons

Refresh Token:
The first goal is going well, however I don’t fully understand the “refresh token” concept.
I understand that an access token only lasts for 30 days, and that a refresh token will grant a new access token, but WHEN should a refresh be called?

If a user doesn’t connect to my server in 30 days then no pages/scripts are loaded by them, thus no calls to refresh the token will be made before expiry. Am I supposed to save refresh tokens to a database and refresh them weekly via CRON jobs or something similar?

I’m also at a loss of how to test this functionality. Can I force an access token to expire early to test that refreshing is working correctly? Or do I just have to wait for 30 days and see if users start complaining about having to complete the OAUTH process again?

Listing Patrons
How should this be done?
Patreons Docs mention “Resource Endpoints” to use, but no information on how to change an “end point” or any example code what so ever.

And if any Patreon devs are here PLEASE just include some basic example scripts in your API.
One to pull campaign data.
One to pull user data.
One to use a refresh token.

The BASICS that everyone needs to know.
I’m sorry but I’m at the end of day 2 of struggling to get the most basic functionality and I’ve never seen an API with such barebones descriptions on how to use it.

Thank you for any help