Nairaland Scraper — Nigeria Forum Topics, Views & Replies

Nairaland in rows: topic title, author, reply count, view count, thread length, last update and a direct link — from any board on Nigeria's largest online forum.

What does the Nairaland Scraper do?

This Actor collects discussion topics from Nairaland, the forum that has been the centre of Nigerian online conversation for two decades, and returns one row per topic with the numbers that tell you whether anyone actually cared: how many replies it drew, how many people read it, and how long the thread ran.

That combination is what makes the export useful rather than decorative. A politics topic with 500 replies and 49,000 views is a story; the same board's median topic has a handful of each. Sorting an export on views surfaces what Nigeria was actually talking about on a given day.

One technical detail matters and the Actor handles it for you. Nairaland serves Nigerian visitors and starts refusing requests from elsewhere once you browse past the first page or two. Runs are therefore pinned to Nigerian residential addresses, which is the difference between two pages of rows and a full crawl.

Who is it for?

• Market researchers tracking Nigerian consumer sentiment and conversation.
• Journalists and media monitors covering Nigerian politics, business and culture.
• Brand and reputation teams watching how a company or product is discussed.
• Social scientists studying West African online discourse at scale.
• Recruiters and job-market analysts following the jobs and career boards.
• Trend analysts measuring what breaks out and how fast.
• NLP teams building Nigerian-English conversational datasets.

Use cases

• Track the politics board through an election cycle.
• Find the highest-engagement topics on a board by views or replies.
• Monitor the jobs and career boards for hiring activity.
• Watch a brand or product surface in the business or technology-market boards.
• Measure discussion volume on a topic over time.
• Identify the most active contributors on a board.
• Build a Nigerian-English text corpus seeded from real thread titles.
• Compare engagement across boards — politics against romance against education.

Why use this Nairaland Scraper?

• Nigeria-pinned proxying built in. Without it the crawl dies around page three; with it, thousands of topics come back cleanly.
• Engagement numbers on every row — replies, views and thread length, not just titles.
• Author and last poster, so you can see who starts conversations and who keeps them alive.
• Multiple boards in one run, each row tagged with the board it came from.
• Pinned announcement threads handled. Boards repeat sticky topics on every page; the crawler deduplicates them instead of stalling.
• Direct topic and author links for anything you want to open or follow up.

What data can you extract?

Field	Description
topicId	Nairaland's own topic identifier
title	Topic title
board	Which board the topic came from
author	Username who started the thread
posts	Number of posts in the thread
views	How many times the thread was viewed
pages	How many pages long the thread runs
lastUpdated	When it was last posted to, in Nairaland's own wording
lastPostBy	Username of the most recent poster
authorUrl	Link to the author's profile
url	Direct link to the topic

Sample output

{
  "topicId": "8728879",
  "title": "2026: Osun Governorship Election (Live Updates)",
  "board": "politics",
  "author": "fergie001",
  "posts": 524,
  "views": 49267,
  "pages": 17,
  "lastUpdated": "11:16am On Aug 24",
  "lastPostBy": "tfrancis",
  "authorUrl": "https://www.nairaland.com/fergie001",
  "url": "https://www.nairaland.com/8728879/2026-osun-governorship-election-live"
}

How to use the Nairaland Scraper

Option A — one board

Put a board name in Boards — politics, business, jobs, romance, education, technology-market, career, health, celebrities — set Maximum topics and run.

Option B — several boards at once

List multiple boards, one per line. The row budget is shared across them and every row carries its board.

Option C — paste board URLs

Full URLs work too. https://www.nairaland.com/politics is accepted exactly as copied from the address bar.

Option D — find what broke out

Run a board deep, then sort the export on views or posts. The top of that list is the day's real story.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
boards	array	Board names or URLs, one per line
maxItems	integer	How many topics to collect in total
proxyConfiguration	object	Nigerian residential proxying — required

Tips for best results

• Leave the proxy as configured. Nigerian residential is not a preference here; deeper pages are refused from anywhere else.
• Sort on views, not position. Board order is recency; views tell you what mattered.
• pages is a good proxy for thread depth — a seventeen-page thread is a sustained argument, not a one-line post.
• Board names come from the URL. Use technology-market, not "Technology Market".
• Pinned topics repeat on every page. They appear once in your export; that is the deduplication working.

Integrations

Send results to Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, Zapier, Make or your own service through Apify's integrations, or schedule a daily run to track a board over time.

API usage

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_USERNAME~nairaland-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "boards": ["politics", "business"],
    "maxItems": 1000
  }'

Results export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Available as a tool through Apify's MCP server, so an agent can answer "what is Nairaland discussing about the election" or pull the day's highest-engagement topics on demand.

FAQ

Do I need a Nairaland account?

No. The board pages this Actor reads are open to any visitor.

Why does it require a proxy?

Nairaland answers Nigerian addresses and begins refusing requests from elsewhere past the first page or two. The run is pinned to Nigerian residential addresses so the crawl can go deep.

How many topics can one run return?

Boards page a long way back. Thousands of topics from a single board is routine.

Does it collect the post content?

No. This Actor exports the topic row — title, author, replies, views, thread length and last update. Post bodies are not included.

What boards are available?

Any board name that appears in a Nairaland URL: politics, business, jobs, career, education, romance, health, celebrities, technology-market, nairaland and the rest.

Why is lastUpdated text rather than a date?

Nairaland writes recent activity as "11:16am On Aug 24" with no year. Rather than guess a year and ship a date column that is quietly wrong on older threads, the Actor reports the site's own wording.

Why is lastPostBy occasionally empty?

On a thread nobody has replied to, the author and the last poster are the same person and Nairaland prints only one name.

Can I export to CSV or Excel?

Yes — JSON, CSV, Excel, XML and RSS.

How fresh is the data?

Every run reads Nairaland live.

Why did my run return zero topics?

Usually a board name that does not exist. Open nairaland.com/<board> in a browser to confirm it loads.

Is it legal to scrape Nairaland?

This Actor reads only public board pages that any visitor can open, and collecting publicly available data is generally lawful. You are responsible for how you use it — respect Nairaland's terms, treat usernames as personal data under applicable privacy law, and do not use author links for unsolicited bulk contact.

Related scrapers

Pair with the other forum, social and regional Actors in the store to cover community discussion across markets alongside Nigeria.