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💬 5ch Thread Tracker — Japan's Biggest Anonymous Forum (Threads + Posts)

Optional delivery: Send results straight to your own Notion database or Supabase table in the same run, via Apify's native MCP connectors — the Actor never sees your credentials. One-click connect: Notion or Supabase. Leave blank to get the dataset as usual.

Scrape 5ch (5ちゃんねる, formerly 2channel) — the largest and most influential anonymous message board in Japan, the cultural ancestor of 4chan and the place Japanese opinion actually forms. Pull live thread lists with real post counts, or read every post inside a thread for full-text mining — across boards like ニュース速報+ (newsplus), ニュー速VIP, 芸スポ速報+, and 政治ニュース+. No login, no API.

This is the single hardest-to-reach high-signal text corpus in Japan, and it's almost entirely off-limits to Western scrapers. There's no English-language tool for it, the server topology is non-obvious, and the content is dense, unfiltered Japanese public opinion you cannot get anywhere else. For JP sentiment analysis, trend detection, RAG corpora, and brand monitoring, this is untapped gold.

📊 Sample Output

👁 5ch thread tracker scraper sample output — live Japanese forum thread list with board, thread ID, title and post count for sentiment analysis and trend monitoring on 5ch / 2channel

Real threads returned by this actor for { "mode": "board-threads", "board": "newsplus", "maxItems": 12 } — every row below comes straight from a live run:

Post count is the buzz signal. A thread climbing past 800 posts is what's actually gripping Japan right now — politics, business, and world news surface here first, raw and unmoderated, long before they reach English coverage. Switch to thread-posts mode to pull every post for sentiment and RAG.

What you get

In board-threads / search mode, per thread:

• Location — board (slug), thread_id
• Topic — title (the full Japanese thread title)
• Activity — post_count (the live buzz signal), last_active
• Drill-down — thread_url (direct link to read every post)
• Provenance — data_source, as_of_timestamp

In thread-posts mode, per post inside a thread: post number, author handle, ID, timestamp, and full body text — a clean, line-by-line corpus ready for sentiment analysis, RAG, or full-text search.

Sample inputs

1. List active threads on a board (trend/buzz monitoring)

{"mode":"board-threads","board":"newsplus","maxItems":12}

2. Read every post in one thread (sentiment / RAG corpus)

{"mode":"thread-posts","threadUrl":"https://asahi.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/newsplus/1781490904/","maxItems":500}

3. Filter a board's threads by keyword

{"mode":"search","board":"mnewsplus","query":"声優","maxItems":50}

JSON sample record

One representative thread record, exactly as returned:

{
"board":"newsplus",
"thread_id":"1781490904",
"title":"「餃子の王将」が直面する“客単価1200円の壁” なぜ、売上好調なのに株価が下…",
"post_count":369,
"thread_url":"https://asahi.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/newsplus/1781490904/",
"last_active":"2026-06-15T04:36:46Z",
"data_source":"asahi.5ch.io/newsplus/subject.txt",
"as_of_timestamp":"2026-06-15T04:53:40Z"
}

How it works

5ch publishes each board's live thread index as a subject.txt file and serves posts via read.cgi — but the board-to-server mapping is non-obvious and changes. This actor reads the live 5ch board directory (bbsmenu) to resolve each board's current server automatically, fetches subject.txt for thread lists, and parses read.cgi pages for full post text in thread-posts mode. No headless browser, no login, no brittle DOM scraping — just clean structured records. maxItems is a hard ceiling, so compute and your bill never outrun what you asked for.

🗾 Why this Japanese data is unique

5ch is where modern Japanese internet culture was born — the original 2channel seeded everything from 4chan to the AA art and slang that saturate JP media. Crucially, it's anonymous, so opinion here is unguarded in a way no Japanese social platform matches; for many news, political, and consumer topics, the real public reaction shows up on 5ch first. There is no English-facing tool that surfaces it. Pulling these threads and posts in clean, structured fields gives you a sentiment and early-trend feed your competitors literally cannot see.

⚖️ Legal & ToS

This actor reads only public 5ch pages — the same thread lists and posts any visitor sees, via the public subject.txt and read.cgi endpoints, no login required. It collects publicly posted, anonymous, user-generated content. It does not access private data, member areas, or anything behind authentication. 5ch posts are anonymous by design and may contain strong or unfiltered language; you are responsible for using and moderating the output in line with 5ch's terms and your local regulations.

❓ FAQ

Q: Do I need a 5ch account or API key? A: No. The actor works entirely off public board indexes and thread pages — no login, no token.

Q: How do I find the right board slug? A: Use the board's path slug — e.g. newsplus (ニュース速報+), news4vip (ニュー速VIP), mnewsplus (芸スポ速報+, entertainment & sports), seijinewsplus (政治ニュース+, politics). The actor resolves the server automatically from the live bbsmenu.

Q: What's the difference between the three modes? A: board-threads lists a board's active threads (titles + post counts) — best for trend monitoring. thread-posts reads every post in one thread (supply threadUrl) — best for sentiment and RAG. search lists a board's threads then keeps only those whose title contains your keyword.

Q: Why does post_count matter so much? A: On 5ch, thread velocity is the buzz metric. A thread racing toward 1,000 posts (5ch's per-thread cap) is what Japan is most heated about right now — it's your earliest trend signal.

Q: Why did I get fewer threads than maxItems? A: A board only has so many active threads at any moment. maxItems is a ceiling, not a target — getting fewer is normal, not an error.

🔗 Related Actors

Pair this with the rest of the NexGenData Asia-data fleet — the markets Western scrapers can't reach:

• 🇯🇵 Yahoo! Japan Realtime Trends — Live Buzz Ranking — what Japan is searching for right now
• 📺 Niconico Video Search — Japan's Bilibili — search and rank Japan's homegrown video platform
• 🔥 Weibo Hot Search Tracker — China's #1 Trend Surface — the China counterpart for trend and buzz monitoring
• 🏢 About NexGenData — we maintain 260+ production Apify actors for lead-gen, competitive intelligence, and hard-to-reach web data. Browse the full catalog at apify.com/nexgendata.

💰 Pricing example

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for threads/posts that actually land in your dataset:

• Actor start: $0.005
• Per item: $0.10

A 12-thread board pull = $0.005 + (12 × $0.10) = $1.205. Reading a full 500-post thread = $0.005 + (500 × $0.10) = $50.005 — so use maxItems to scope deep thread-posts runs to exactly what you need. No monthly minimum, no seats, no surprise overage bills.

⭐ Found this useful?

If this actor gave you a read on Japanese public opinion no other tool could, a quick review on the Apify Store helps other teams discover it. Feature request or bug? Open it from the Issues tab — we read every one.