Forum Search API - Reddit, Reviews, Blogs, News, BoardReader

Search licensed message board, forum, Reddit, blog, news, review, video, Quora, TikTok and VK conversations through the Socialgist BoardReader API, and get one clean row per post with its text, URL, author, site, dates and engagement, ready for a spreadsheet, a warehouse or a model.

What it collects

• Message boards and forums: the long-tail community sites search engines skip, with subject, text, thread title, forum, site, domain, country, language, author and author profile, and whether the post started the thread.
• Reddit posts and comments with subreddit, author, score and permalink, filterable to posts or comments only.
• Blogs and online news, optionally with their comments, with feed title, author, country and language.
• Consumer reviews with rating, reviewed item, review site and country.
• Video posts and comments with likes and comment counts; Quora questions and answers with upvotes, views and comments; TikTok videos and comments with likes, plays and replies; VK posts and comments with likes and comments.
• Filters: date range, languages, countries, domains (include or exclude), author, sort order (relevance, newest, oldest, recently indexed), comments switch, full text or snippet, and any other documented parameter as JSON.
• Key info: the daily request limit, matches per query, history window and sources your key allows.
• Read only, pay per result, bring your own key.

Input

Field	What it does
Source	Message boards and forums (default), Reddit, blogs, news, reviews, video, Quora, TikTok, VK, or key info.
Search query	Keywords in the provider's extended syntax: phrases in quotes, a pipe for OR, a minus to exclude, @subject word for one field.
Start date / End date	YYYY-MM-DD or a Unix timestamp. With no dates the provider searches the last 3 months.
Languages, countries, domains	Lists. Countries are ISO two-letter codes; a domain prefixed with - is excluded.
Author	One author name.
Sort by	Relevance, newest first, oldest first, recently indexed first and more.
Comments	Blogs, news and video: posts only, posts and comments, or comments only.
Reddit item type	Posts, comments or both.
Full text / Detail level	Full post text instead of a snippet; full or basic field set.
Extra parameters	Any other documented parameter, such as {"filter_score": "gte100"}.
Maximum results	Row cap for the run, up to 10,000.
BoardReader API key	Your own key, as a secret input, or the DATA_API_KEY secret.

FAQ

What is a forum search API used for?

Getting real customer conversation out of the places it actually happens. A brand team tracks complaints about a product across car, parenting and hobby forums. A pharma insights team pulls patient discussion of a drug from health boards and Reddit. An AI team builds a training or evaluation set from long-tail community text. A market researcher compares review ratings and forum sentiment for competing products.

Which data source does this actor read?

The BoardReader API at api.boardreader.com, run by Socialgist and documented publicly at api.boardreader.com/docs. It calls only the documented search routes (Boards, Reddit, Blogs, News, Reviews, Video, Quora, TikTok and VK) and the Keys info route. Socialgist licenses this data; it is not scraped by this actor.

Do I need an API key?

Yes. This actor is bring-your-own-key and never ships one. Socialgist issues BoardReader keys to customers of its Find plan. Paste the key into the input, or set it once as the DATA_API_KEY environment secret. A missing, invalid, expired or disabled key ends the run cleanly with a message saying which it was, and so does a used-up daily limit.

How far back can I search, and how many posts can one run return?

Without dates the provider searches the last 3 months; with dates, as far back as your key's history window allows (the key info mode shows it). Results are read 100 per request. One query returns up to the key's matches-per-query limit, 1,000 by default, and this actor caps a run at 10,000 rows. Split a large export by date range to go further.

Why do message board dates look a few hours off?

The provider stores forum post times in US Eastern local time because the source sites rarely state a time zone. When you give dates as YYYY-MM-DD for message boards, the actor adds the Eastern offset the provider's docs prescribe, so the range lines up with UTC days.

How do I search one field or exclude words?

Use the extended query syntax: @subject recall searches forum subjects only, @title and @text work for Reddit, "exact phrase" matches a phrase, | means OR and -word excludes. Characters such as !, $, (, ) and / need a backslash to be taken literally.

Can this actor change anything in my account?

No. Every call is a GET, and the API has no write routes. The key travels only to api.boardreader.com and never appears in a row or in the log; the key info row leaves the key itself out.

How is it priced?

Pay per result: one price per post, comment, review or video returned, and a lower one for the key info row. Searches with no matches are free. Your Socialgist subscription applies separately.

Example output

{
  "source": "boards",
  "sourceLabel": "Message boards and forums",
  "recordType": "post",
  "query": "\"electric bike\" battery",
  "found": true,
  "id": "123456789",
  "title": "Battery range dropped after the first winter",
  "text": "My electric bike battery used to get 40 miles and now struggles to do 25...",
  "url": "https://forum.example.com/threads/battery-range.4567/#post-89012",
  "published": "2026-09-14 08:21:00",
  "inserted": "2026-09-14 13:05:12",
  "author": "rider_example",
  "authorUrl": "https://forum.example.com/members/rider_example.321/",
  "site": "Example E-Bike Forum",
  "siteUrl": "https://forum.example.com/",
  "domain": "example.com",
  "language": "English",
  "country": "US",
  "threadTitle": "Battery range dropped after the first winter",
  "isComment": true,
  "score": null,
  "likes": null,
  "comments": 18,
  "views": null,
  "rating": null,
  "record": { "Id": "123456789", "Subject": "Battery range dropped after the first winter", "SiteTitle": "Example E-Bike Forum" },
  "retrievedAt": "2026-10-02T09:14:52.118Z",
  "note": null
}

Values are illustrative; every field is one the provider documents. Reddit rows fill score, review rows fill rating, and video, Quora, TikTok and VK rows fill likes, comments and views where the source has them. The provider's whole record is kept in record.

Keyword map

forum search API, message board search, forum data API, Reddit search API, Reddit comments export, blog search API, news search API, review data API, consumer reviews export, social listening data, long-tail social data, community data for AI training, Quora data, TikTok comments data, VK data, BoardReader API, Socialgist API, Socialgist BoardReader.