Stack Exchange Questions Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Stack Exchange's API (api.stackexchange.com/2.3) covers every site in the network — Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, Cross Validated, plus 170+ topic sites. This Actor wraps the questions endpoint, paginates safely (respecting the backoff field), and writes one row per question with body, tags, and key metadata.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Support-knowledge mining — pull the top 100 voted Q&A for your product's tag.
• Trend monitoring — daily diffs on the hot sort to see emergent issues.
• Help-center seed — feed Q&A bodies into a RAG store for an internal documentation bot.
• Recruiter outreach — extract askers from a react tag, score by reputation (via user endpoint).

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
site	string	no	'stackoverflow'	Site slug, e.g. stackoverflow, superuser, serverfault, askubuntu, <c
mode	string	no	'tagged'	How to find questions.
tags	array	no	['python']	Tags to filter by. Multiple tags = OR by default; use one to keep it tight.
searchQuery	string	no	'—'	Free-text search query.
userId	integer	no	'—'	Numeric Stack Exchange user id.
sortBy	string	no	'activity'	Stack Exchange API sort param.
maxResults	integer	no	30	Max items across pages. API caps page size at 100.
includeBody	boolean	no	True	Request filter=withbody to include the full question body. Slightly bigger payload.
apiKey	string	no	'—'	Get one at stackapps.com — lifts the daily quota from 300 to 10 000 requests.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': False}	Optional. The API is friendly to direct clients.

Example input

{
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "mode": "tagged",
  "tags": [
    "python"
  ],
  "sortBy": "votes",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "includeBody": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
question_id	integer	Stack Exchange question id.
site	string	Site slug the question came from.
title	string	Question title.
body_html	['string', 'null']	Question body in HTML (when includeBody=true).
tags	array	Tags applied to the question.
score	integer	Net score (upvotes minus downvotes).
view_count	integer	Question views.
answer_count	integer	Number of answers.
is_answered	boolean	Has an accepted answer or any positive-score answer.
accepted_answer_id	['integer', 'null']	Accepted answer id, when present.
link	string	Canonical question URL.
owner_user_id	['integer', 'null']	Asker user id.
owner_display_name	['string', 'null']	Asker display name.
creation_date	integer	Unix timestamp — created at.
last_activity_date	integer	Unix timestamp — last activity.
posted_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC derived from creation_date.
scraped_at	string	When this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "question_id": 1234567,
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "title": "How do I close a connection cleanly in asyncio?",
  "tags": [
    "python",
    "asyncio"
  ],
  "score": 142,
  "answer_count": 3,
  "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234567/..."
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.0015	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $1.50. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

Comments, voting graph, and revisions are not in scope. Search ranking is the API's, which differs from the website's UI search.

❓ FAQ

Why is the API quota so low?

Stack Exchange caps anonymous usage at 300 requests/day. Sign up for a key and you get 10 000.

Can I get answers too?

Out of scope here — see the sibling Actor stackexchange-answers-scraper (planned).

What about voting / posting?

We do not write to Stack Exchange. Read-only API access only.

Why are some user fields null?

Some questions are asked by deleted users — the API surfaces null.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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