TLS Law School Forum Scraper

Extract discussion threads from Top-Law-Schools.com — the largest pre-law community forum. Returns admissions-cycle chatter, scholarship-negotiation threads, and candid school reviews across every board: Admissions, Choosing a Law School, Financial Aid, Class-of-year boards, practice-area boards, and more.

---

Features

• Discovers and covers every board on the forum — not one department. No board list to maintain; new boards are picked up automatically.
• Returns the thread title, board, original poster, post date, reply/view counts, last-post date, canonical thread URL, and the first post's full text.
• Derives school-name tags from the thread title (e.g. a thread comparing Vanderbilt and Tulane is tagged ["Vanderbilt", "Tulane"]) — empty when a thread doesn't name a school, never a guess.
• Set maxItems to control how many threads you need; the crawl samples across the whole forum rather than draining one board first.
• Resumable — a run that stops partway through a large crawl can continue without re-fetching or re-charging for threads already collected.

---

Who Uses TLS Forum Data?

• Pre-law advising services — Ground admissions guidance in what applicants are actually asking and comparing, not just published stats.
• Legal education researchers — Study qualitative admissions-cycle sentiment (scholarship negotiation, school comparisons, candid reviews) alongside hard-stat sources.
• Content and marketing teams — Surface trending topics, questions, and school comparisons for pre-law audiences.
• Sentiment and market analysts — Track how applicant sentiment toward specific schools shifts across an admissions cycle.

---

How It Works

1. Discover boards — The scraper reads the forum index and finds every active board.
2. List threads — Each board's thread list is paginated, collecting title, author, dates, and reply/view counts per thread.
3. Fetch first post — Each thread's opening post is fetched for its full text.
4. Export — Results land in your Apify dataset as clean JSON. maxItems controls how many threads you get back.

---

Input

{
  "maxItems": 50
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of threads to return.
resumeCursor	string	—	Cursor from a previous run's Output. Supply it to continue a large crawl without re-fetching or re-charging for threads already received.

---

Output Fields

{
  "thread_title": "Going to a T14 at full COA vs. t20 with half scholarship",
  "board": "Law School Admissions Forum",
  "author": "PatrickAtkins1989",
  "post_date": "Fri Jul 24, 2026 5:35 pm",
  "reply_count": 1,
  "view_count": 126,
  "last_post_date": "Thu Jul 30, 2026 5:10 pm",
  "thread_url": "https://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=316099",
  "first_post_body": "To preface, I am a 24 year old who has worked as a paralegal for just over two years...",
  "tags": []
}

Field	Type	Description
thread_title	string	Thread title
board	string	Board name (e.g. "Choosing a Law School", "Financial Aid")
author	string	Original poster's username
post_date	string	Original post's timestamp
reply_count	number	Number of replies in the thread
view_count	number	Number of views on the thread
last_post_date	string	Timestamp of the most recent post
thread_url	string	Canonical thread URL
first_post_body	string	Full text of the opening post
tags	array	Law schools named in the thread title, if any

---

Resuming a large crawl

Every run emits a resumeCursor in its Output. If a large forum-wide crawl stops before it finishes — because it hit maxItems, a spend cap, or was aborted — you can pick up where it left off: start a new run with the same input plus that resumeCursor. The crawl continues from the queued work the previous run didn't reach.

• You are not re-charged for threads the earlier run already delivered.
• Resume within your account's run-retention window — on the free tier, roughly the 10 most recent runs. Once the source run is pruned, its resumeCursor is no longer valid.
• resumeCursor is opaque — supply it unmodified.

{
  "maxItems": 500,
  "resumeCursor": "<paste the resumeCursor from the previous run's Output>"
}

---

FAQ

How do I scrape Top-Law-Schools forum threads?

Set maxItems to how many threads you need and run. The scraper discovers every board on the forum, walks each board's thread list, and returns each thread's metadata plus the full text of its opening post.

Does this cover the whole forum or just one board?

The whole forum. The scraper discovers every active board from the forum index at run time — Admissions, Choosing a Law School, Financial Aid, Class-of-year boards, practice-area boards, and identity/affinity boards — rather than a fixed list, so newly added boards are picked up automatically.

What data can I get from TLS?

Thread title, board, original poster, post date, reply and view counts, last-post date, the canonical thread URL, and the opening post's full text. Threads that name a specific school in their title also carry a tags field with the school(s) named.

How much does this cost to run?

Pay-per-event pricing. You're charged per thread returned, plus a small run-start fee.

---

Need More Features?

Need custom fields, reply-thread extraction, or a different output shape? Open an issue or get in touch.

Why Use This Scraper?

• Whole-forum coverage — Every board, discovered automatically, not a hand-picked subset.
• Qualitative admissions intel — Scholarship negotiation, school comparisons, and candid reviews you won't find in structured stat databases.
• Clean, consistent output — Every record has the same shape: thread metadata plus the opening post's full text.
• Resumable — Pick up a large crawl where it left off without paying twice for the same thread.