Mumsnet Scraper — Threads, Replies, Quotes & Keyword Search

Extract structured, analysis-ready data from Mumsnet Talk — the UK's largest parenting forum, with millions of active monthly discussions across pregnancy, parenting, relationships, style & beauty, and dozens of other boards.

Scrape specific threads by URL, or monitor a topic or brand across all of Mumsnet with keyword search — built for market research, PR/media monitoring, and sentiment analysis at UK-consumer scale.

Why this Actor

Mumsnet drives real purchasing decisions and public conversation in the UK, but until now there's been no dedicated way to extract its discussions at scale. This Actor was built directly against Mumsnet's real markup — not assumptions — and handles the details that matter for clean data:

• Quote-aware extraction — when a reply quotes an earlier post, that quoted text is captured separately (quoted_author / quoted_text), never mixed into the replier's own words.
• Moderation-aware — posts removed by Mumsnet's moderators are flagged (moderation_status) instead of silently appearing as missing data.
• Genuine pagination — long threads (100+ replies spanning many pages) are followed end-to-end with continuous, gap-free post numbering.
• Real user images only — photos users actually upload are captured; Mumsnet's own UI icons and reaction emoji are filtered out.

Two ways to scrape

1. Direct URLs — paste specific thread or board URLs for precise, targeted extraction.

2. Keyword search / monitoring — supply search terms and the Actor discovers and scrapes matching threads across Mumsnet automatically. Narrow to one board, a date range, or a minimum/maximum reply count to focus on high-engagement discussions.

Input options

Field	What it does
startUrls	Specific thread or board URLs to scrape
searchKeywords	Topics/brands to discover and scrape matching threads for
boardCategory	Restrict search to one board (e.g. teenagers, pregnancy, _chat)
dateFrom / dateTo	Only include posts within a date range
minReplies / maxReplies	Only include threads within a reply-count range
maxThreads / maxThreadsPerKeyword	Safety limits on run size
maxPagesPerThread	How deep to follow pagination on long threads
proxyConfiguration	Standard Apify Proxy routing for larger runs

Output fields

Each scraped post is a single dataset row:

{
  "thread_id": "5567579",
  "thread_title": "Turning 50 - what can I do to make myself feel better",
  "board_category": "style_and_beauty",
  "post_id": "154200495",
  "post_type": "reply",
  "post_number": 5,
  "author": "PenelopePritstop",
  "post_date": "2026-08-17T10:00:00.000Z",
  "body_text": "I don't go out without make up ever! ...",
  "quoted_author": null,
  "quoted_text": null,
  "images": [],
  "moderation_status": null,
  "thread_url": "https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/style_and_beauty/...",
  "page_number": 1,
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-18T09:32:56.099Z"
}

Use cases

• PR & media monitoring — track brand or topic mentions across UK parenting/consumer conversation
• Market research — understand real consumer sentiment on products, services, and decisions (schools, childcare products, holidays, health & beauty)
• Academic & social research — study parenting discourse, community dynamics, or discussion patterns over time
• Trend tracking — scheduled runs with keyword search to monitor an evolving topic

A note on the data

Mumsnet is a public, open forum — content is visible without an account and is indexed by search engines. This Actor extracts what's already public. It does not access private messages, does not bypass any login wall, and does not scrape anything requiring authentication.