5ch (5channel) Scraper

What does 5ch Scraper do?

Extracts posts from 5ch.net (formerly 2channel) — Japan's largest and most influential anonymous forum. Point it at any board and get structured posts with correct Shift_JIS → UTF-8 handling: thread title, post number, poster name and ID, timestamp (JST, ISO-8601) and clean plain text.

• Board sweeps — scrapes threads from subject.txt, most-replied first
• Thread mode — pass specific thread IDs to track discussions
• Japanese text done right — no mojibake, redirect-wrapper links cleaned

Why scrape 5ch?

• Japanese market research — 5ch is where unfiltered Japanese consumer opinion lives (electronics, games, finance, entertainment).
• Trend & sentiment analysis — the origin of much of Japanese internet culture; topics surface here first.
• Academic research — one of the most studied online communities in Japan.

How do I use it?

1. Click Try for free — the prefilled board works as-is.
2. Paste a board URL from menu.5ch.net (e.g. https://greta.5ch.net/poverty/), set Max posts.
3. Run and download JSON/CSV — or connect the Apify API / MCP server.

How much will it cost?

$1.00 per 1,000 posts ($0.001 each) plus a $0.005 start fee. A 1,000-post pull from a hot thread costs $1.

⬇️ Input

{
  "boardUrl": "https://greta.5ch.net/poverty/",
  "maxItems": 500
}

⬆️ Output (real example)

{
  "source": "5ch.net",
  "board": "poverty",
  "thread_id": "1789686179",
  "thread_title": "【画像】BBCさん、とんでもない写真を世界に配信してしまうwwww",
  "post_no": 1,
  "is_op": true,
  "url": "https://greta.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/poverty/1789686179/1",
  "name": "それでも動く名無し",
  "poster_id": "12u3wGqA0",
  "posted_at": "2026-09-17T18:45:02+09:00",
  "text": "なんだい？これは…\nhttps://i.imgur.com/vYTbXEa.jpeg",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-18T02:00:00+00:00"
}

Limitations & fair use

• Threads that fell off the board (dat落ち) return an error item (not charged).
• Poster IDs are 5ch's own per-day pseudonymous IDs — no personal data is collected beyond what posters publish publicly.
• The Actor paces itself between threads to stay polite with 5ch's servers.
• Content warning: 5ch is anonymous and lightly moderated; content comes as-is.

FAQ

Which boards work?

Any board on *.5ch.net (and bbspink mirrors using the same engine). Find them at menu.5ch.net. If a board URL is invalid you get an immediate clear error — nothing charged beyond the start fee.

Is the Japanese text safe to feed into my pipeline?

Yes — everything is decoded from Shift_JIS and delivered as clean UTF-8 plain text with line breaks preserved.

Something broke

Open an issue in the Issues tab — canary-tested daily, fixes ship fast.

Your feedback

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