Telegram Historical Archive / Research Dataset Export

Export public Telegram channel profiles and message history as a normalized, reusable research dataset — for archival analysis, indexing, and downstream intelligence workflows.

Public and credential-free: the actor reads only Telegram's server-rendered public web preview (https://t.me/s/<channel>) with a plain HTTP fetch parsed by Cheerio. No login, no cookies, no API keys, no proxy escalation, no headless browser. It never accesses private content and never asks for your Telegram credentials.

Task modes (polymorphic templates)

One extraction engine serves several Telegram surfaces. Pick a mode:

Mode	Purpose
legacy_channel_scraper	Backward-compatible with the original deployed actor (channels, maxMessages, dateFrom/dateTo).
historical_archive	Export public channel history into a normalized research archive.
research_dataset_export	Bounded public-message dataset with stable fields for research/enrichment.
media_link_inventory	Inventory public media and outbound links from a channel.
recent_monitor	Check recent public posts for fresh updates.
incremental_update_seed	Bounded latest-message seed for downstream delta comparison.
channel_summary	Resolve a public profile into a compact channel summary.
message_probe	Small public-message sample for schema validation / triage.

Input

See .actor/INPUT_SCHEMA.json. Common fields: telegramChannelOrProfile (or legacy channels), mode, messageLimit (or legacy maxMessages), includeMedia, includeReplies, dateRange (or legacy dateFrom/dateTo). proxyConfiguration is accepted for compatibility but non-escalating.

Output

Records are pushed to the dataset (.actor/dataset_schema.json) with Messages, Media & Links, and Channels views. Each message row carries text, author, date, views, edited/album flags, media references (photo/video/document/voice/sticker/poll), link previews, and outbound links. A per-run summary is written to the default key-value store under OUTPUT (.actor/output_schema.json).

Standby mode

The actor supports the Apify Standby Actor spec: when started in Standby mode it runs a warm HTTP server instead of a one-shot run, answering requests without cold starts.

GET  /?channel=<@handle|url>&mode=<task>&messageLimit=<n>
POST /            (JSON body = actor input)

The server answers the platform readiness probe and returns scraped records as JSON in the HTTP response (it does not push to the shared dataset). Enable Standby in the Actor's Settings tab in the Apify Console.

Deployment

Deployment-ready Apify Actor scaffold. Runs on apify/actor-node:22 via npm start (tsx src/main.ts).