Discourse Forum Monitor — New Topics & Replies

Know the moment your product is mentioned in a community — without reading it all day.

What is the Discourse Forum Monitor?

This Actor monitors any Discourse community for new topics, new replies, brand mentions and threads that are picking up steam. It returns only what changed since your last run, so a daily or hourly schedule stays cheap.

Discourse powers thousands of technical and product communities — including the OpenAI, Docker and Rust forums — and all of them expose public JSON endpoints.

Only the delta, with anti-noise thresholds

Dumping a forum every hour means paying for the same thousand topics repeatedly. This Actor keeps a snapshot in a named key-value store in your own account and reports the difference.

Trending detection uses both a relative and an absolute threshold, deliberately. Without an absolute floor, a topic going from 4 views to 5 shows up as "trending" — technically a 25% jump, practically noise.

The first run is a baseline: no per-result charge, small sample returned.

What you can use it for

What you want	How to ask for it
Social listening — mentions of your product	keywords: ["yourbrand"]
Brand monitoring across communities	Several forumUrls at once
Support triage — catch a bug report early	Alert on new topics matching your terms
Developer relations — questions as they are asked	Watch the forum of your own product
Competitor community watch	Their forum URL, look for churn language
Product feedback mining	Feature requests as they emerge
Trending thread detection	Read trending changes, tuned by minViews
Content ideas	What the community keeps asking about

Typical jobs: social listening, brand monitoring, community monitoring, and developer-relations triage.

What data you get

For each change: the change type, topic title, URL, category, tags, author, post count, view count, the view delta where relevant, creation and last-activity timestamps, and the matched keyword when you are filtering for mentions.

Input

Every field is optional unless marked required.

Field	Type	Description
oneShot	boolean	Return the CURRENT topics instead of what changed. Use this for a single lookup or from an AI agent — the monitor needs two runs before it has anything to compare. It never touches your saved history.
forumUrls	array, required	Just the domain: community.openai.com, meta.discourse.org, forum.rclone.org. Almost every developer tool and SaaS community runs Discourse. This actor watches the forums you choose; it does not discover them.
keywords	array	Watch only topics mentioning these words — your product, a competitor, a feature. Leave empty to watch the forum's recent topics instead.
monitorKey	string	Keep this the same across runs — it is how the actor remembers what it already saw. Use a different name for an independent watchlist.
trackSignals	array	Leave empty to get everything. New topic and new replies are what you usually want for brand monitoring.
maxPages	integer	Only when not using keywords. Each page is 30 topics. Keep it stable across runs.
minViews	integer	Ignore topics below this view count. Views are only available when watching recent topics, not keyword search.
categoryIds	array	Only watch these forum categories. Find the ID in the category URL. Leave empty for all.
tags	array	Only watch topics carrying at least one of these tags. Leave empty for all.
maxChanges	integer	Safety cap. You are charged per change returned.
resetBaseline	boolean	Forget everything seen before and take a fresh baseline. The baseline run is never charged per result.
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional. Discourse forums are usually reachable without a proxy, but a busy schedule across many forums may need one.

Input sample

{
  "forumUrls": [
    "community.openai.com",
    "meta.discourse.org"
  ],
  "keywords": [
    "pricing"
  ]
}

Output sample

One real row from an actual run:

{
  "changeType": "baseline",
  "signals": [],
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-03T02:39:13.443Z",
  "newReplies": null,
  "previousPostsCount": null,
  "viewsGained": null,
  "previousViews": null,
  "id": "community.openai.com:998238",
  "forumDomain": "community.openai.com",
  "topicId": "998238",
  "title": "New Realtime API voices and cache pricing",
  "slug": "new-realtime-api-voices-and-cache-pricing",
  "url": "https://community.openai.com/t/new-realtime-api-voices-and-cache-pricing/998238",
  "excerpt": null,
  "categoryId": 6,
  "tags": [],
  "postsCount": 27,
  "replyCount": 18,
  "views": 0,
  "likeCount": 0,
  "hasAcceptedAnswer": false,
  "closed": false,
  "pinned": false,
  "lastPosterUsername": null,
  "imageUrl": null,
  "createdAt": "2024-10-30T17:09:19.831Z",
  "lastPostedAt": "2025-09-02T06:45:03.891Z",
  "matchedKeyword": "pricing"
}

Who uses this

• Developer relations — catch questions about your product as they are asked
• Support teams — spot a bug report in a community before it reaches your inbox
• Product managers — feature requests and complaints, as they emerge
• Competitive intelligence — watch a rival's community for churn signals
• Community managers — a digest of what actually moved today

Honest limits

These are real and none of them is fixable by any tool. They are here so you know what you are buying before you run it.

• Discourse forums only. Reddit, Slack, Discord and phpBB are different systems and are not covered.
• The first run is a baseline and returns a sample rather than the whole forum.
• View counts are missing from search results. Discourse's search endpoint does not return them, so keyword-filtered rows may show zero views while the latest-topics feed has them. Documented rather than papered over.
• Private categories are invisible, as they should be — only what a logged-out visitor can read is fetched.
• A change between runs is invisible. A topic created and deleted between two runs will not appear.

FAQ

Which forums does this work on?

Any site running Discourse. If the forum has a URL like /latest.json that returns JSON in your browser, it works. That includes the OpenAI developer forum, meta.discourse.org and thousands of product communities.

Do I need an account on the forum?

No. Only publicly readable content is fetched, exactly what an anonymous visitor sees.

How do I track mentions of my brand?

Put your terms in keywords. The Actor searches for them and reports new matches, so you get an alert feed rather than a full dump.

Why do some rows show zero views?

Because Discourse's search endpoint does not return view counts, unlike its latest-topics endpoint. Rows that came from a keyword search will have zeros there. It is a limitation of the source, not a bug.

What counts as trending?

A topic whose views jumped by both a meaningful percentage and a meaningful absolute number. Both thresholds are configurable — the absolute one exists so that tiny topics do not flood your results.

Can I monitor several forums at once?

Yes, pass a list of forum URLs. Each keeps its own snapshot under your monitor key.

Do I need an account or an API key for the source?

No. This Actor only reads public pages and public endpoints, the same ones any logged-out visitor sees. You never give it credentials, and nothing is done on your behalf.

Is it legal to scrape this data?

Scraping publicly available information is broadly accepted as legal, and this Actor only ever touches pages that require no login. That said, what you may do with the data afterwards is a separate question — personal data in particular is regulated by GDPR and CCPA. If you plan to process personal data, take advice first. Apify has a good primer: Is web scraping legal?

How much will a run cost me?

You are charged per result, so the cost scales with what you actually get back. The pricing is shown on this page above the input form. Start with a small run to see real numbers before you scale up.

Can I export to Excel, CSV or Google Sheets?

Yes. Every run's dataset can be downloaded as CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or HTML from the Storage tab, and Apify integrates directly with Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, Make and Slack.

Can I run this on a schedule?

Yes. Open the Schedules tab and pick an interval — hourly, daily, weekly. Each run only costs you what it returns.

Can I call it from my own code instead of the console?

Yes. Every Actor on Apify is also an API endpoint. There are official clients for Python and JavaScript, plus a plain REST API. The API tab on this page shows ready-made snippets with your input already filled in.

Something came back empty. Is it broken?

Usually not. An empty result normally means the filters were too narrow, or the source genuinely has nothing to return for that query. This Actor is written to finish successfully and tell you what happened rather than fail — check the run log, it says which step returned nothing.

Related Actors

• Company Signals — competitor changes across job board, store and status page
• Google Trends Scraper — search demand for the same topics

Where the data comes from

The public JSON endpoints that every Discourse forum exposes. No login, no API key. Snapshots are kept in your own Apify account.