Community Listening — Social & Forum Signals 👂

foXLabs web & community series: GitHub trending · Hacker News · Wikipedia companies

🎉 Turn community chatter into clean, structured signals — no login, no API key, one row per mention, with the source, author, text, sentiment and links. Built for brand, product and market-research teams.

🔍 What is the Community Listening — and when should you use it?

Give this actor keywords, brands or topics and it returns matching mentions from public community and forum discussions — as clean, deduplicated rows you can filter, export or feed to an AI agent. Every run reads the source live.

Use it when you need: what communities say about a brand or topic; sentiment over time; or a feed of relevant mentions.

Use something else when: you need private analytics — this reads public community discussions only.

🤖 Use with AI agents

Already on the Apify MCP server? Ask for this Actor by name: foxlabs/community-listening.

Your agent can pay for its own runs. This Actor is pay-per-event with agentic payments, so an agent can discover it, run it and settle the bill over x402 (USDC on Base) or Skyfire — no Apify account or API token of its own. Billing is the same either way: per delivered record, never for errors.

Otherwise paste this into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP-enabled assistant:

I want to pull topic company records using the Apify Actor `foxlabs/community-listening`.
Input: `query`, `sources`, `datePreset`, `sortBy` and more — see the Input table below. `maxResults` caps how many results are returned.
Start with: {"query":"supabase","maxResults":500}
Ask me what to look up, run the Actor, then summarise the rows as a table.

The machine-readable API, MCP config and OpenAPI definition live at apify.com/foxlabs/community-listening.md.

📋 Overview

Everything you need to turn public community and forum discussions into clean, structured data — in one actor, with no login, cookies or API key.

Why teams pick this actor:

• ✅ Whole feed, one call — name or ID in, matching mentions out.
• 🧹 No empty-promise columns — only fields this registry actually fills; degenerate columns are removed.
• 🔗 Stable identifiers — every row carries the source's own IDs, ready to join across runs and to other Fox Labs actors.
• 💰 Per-row pricing — a minimal price per delivered row, no subscription.
• 🤖 Agent-ready — MCP + x402 agentic payments.

✨ Features

• 🔍 Name or ID lookup — relevance-ranked name search or exact registry-ID lookup.
• 🏢 Full entity profile — status, legal form, formation date, address and the registry’s own contact fields.
• 🧹 Clean schema — deduplicated camelCase rows, ready for CSV/Excel/JSON.

🎬 Quick Start

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/foxlabs~community-listening/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"supabase","maxResults":500}'

🚀 Getting Started (3 steps)

1. Choose your targets — keywords, brands or topics.
2. Set the cap — maxResults limits how many results are returned.
3. Run and export — get a clean dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

📥 Input

{"query":"supabase","maxResults":500}

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Required. The brand, product, competitor or topic to track — e.g. "supabase", "clickhouse", "self-hosted". Used as the search phrase on Stack Exchange and Lemmy, and as…
sources	array	Which communities to listen to. Every source returns rows in the same shape, tagged with source, so you can filter afterwards.
datePreset	string	How far back to look. Default is all time WITH newest-first sorting, which gives you the most recent mentions without hiding a thin week — Stack Overflow…
sortBy	string	Newest first for monitoring, most-voted for the discussions that mattered, activity for threads still moving.
stackExchangeSites	array	Which sites in the Stack Exchange network to search — e.g. ["stackoverflow", "serverfault", "dba", "security"]. Each site is searched separately. Leave empty for…
lemmyInstance	string	Which Lemmy server to search. Defaults to lemmy.world, the largest general instance; use a niche instance to target its communities.
mastodonInstance	string	Which Mastodon server's hashtag timeline to read. Defaults to mastodon.social; instances federate, so a large one sees most public posts.
mastodonHashtags	array	Hashtags to follow, without the #. Leave empty to use the search term itself. Note: Mastodon's full-text search needs an account token, so this Actor reads…
stackExchangeKey	string	Without a key Stack Exchange allows ~300 requests/day per IP; a free key raises it to 10,000/day and lets big sweeps run faster. Get one at stackapps.com — no…
maxResults	integer	Hard cap on mentions returned across all sources. The budget is shared evenly between the sources you selected — and whatever one source doesn't use passes to…

📤 Output

One row per result, saved to the dataset. Every row carries scrapedAt. Lookups that cannot be completed are reported in the run log rather than silently dropped.

Field	Description
source	Source
community	Community
title	Title
text	Text
url	Url
author	Author
authorUrl	Author Url
authorReputation	Author Reputation
score	Score
comments	Comments
views	Views
isAnswered	Is Answered
tags	Tags
createdAt	Created At
lastActivityAt	Last Activity At
matchedQuery	Matched Query
license	License
fetchedAt	Fetched At
linkUrl	Link Url
authorFollowers	Author Followers
reblogs	Reblogs

💼 Use cases

1. Brand monitoring — track mentions of a brand. Input: brand names. Output: mentions + sentiment. Use: a listening dashboard.

2. Product feedback — gather feedback on a product. Input: product keywords. Output: mentions + text. Use: a feedback log.

3. Trend research — spot emerging topics. Input: topic keywords. Output: mentions over time. Use: a trend report.

🔗 Integration

JavaScript / Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('foxlabs/community-listening').call({"query":"supabase","maxResults":500});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items[0]);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('foxlabs/community-listening').call(run_input={"query":"supabase","maxResults":500})
for item in client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Automation (n8n / Zapier / Make): schedule or webhook → HTTP request to the actor API with your input → handle the JSON dataset → push to a sheet, CRM or dashboard.

📊 Pricing

Pay-per-event: per delivered record. Empty or failed lookups are never billed. View current pricing.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an account, login or API key? No. This reads public community and forum discussions.

What do I search by? Keywords, brands or topics.

How current is the data? Every run queries the source live, so results are as fresh as the registry.

Which communities? Public forums and community discussions the query matches; each row carries the source, author, text and sentiment.

Can I export to CSV / Excel / JSON? Yes — directly from the Apify dataset.

🐛 Troubleshooting

• Fewer rows than expected — raise maxResults, or refine the input.
• A name returns an unexpected entity — it matched a similar registered name; search the exact registry ID.
• No rows for a name — try the entity’s exact legal name or its registry ID.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape this data?

This actor reads publicly available community and forum discussions. Results can still contain personal data (e.g. a person’s name); personal data is protected by the GDPR and similar laws, so only process it with a legitimate basis. See Apify’s blog post on the legality of web scraping.

🤝 Support & contact

• 🌐 Website: data.foxlabs.com.tr
• 📧 Email: info@foxlabs.com.tr
• 🐛 Issues: open a ticket in the Actor’s Issues tab
• 🧰 More clean B2B data actors: Fox Labs on Apify

Changelog

0.1.14 — 2026-09-20 — README examples corrected against the real input schema

• The README's code examples did not match this Actor. They used queries and maxResultsPerQuery — keys that do not exist in this Actor's input schema — with a placeholder value, and the input table listed those same phantom fields. Anyone who copied the AI-agent, cURL, JavaScript or Python example got a failing run. Every example now uses the real schema and matches the Console prefill: {"query":"supabase","maxResults":500}
• The input table is regenerated from input_schema.json, so it lists the fields the Actor actually accepts.
• Removed claims carried over from the same generator template where present: "formation / status monitoring", "a canonical registry record for KYB and due diligence", "every row carries query", and industry described as a NACE code.
• No code, output field or pricing change.

0.1 — 2026-09-07

• Enabled AI-agent payments (x402) + rebuilt the README to the full standard (What-is / when, AI-agents + x402 agentic payments + MCP, Overview, Features, Use cases, Integration, FAQ, Troubleshooting, Support & contact).

0.0

• Initial release: data from public community and forum discussions by name or registry ID.