# Changelog of WeChat Official Account Scraper — Articles, Accounts & Search (`sian.agency/wechat-official-account-data-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/sian.agency/wechat-official-account-data-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/sian.agency/wechat-official-account-data-scraper.md

## Changelog

All notable changes to the WeChat Official Account Data Scraper will be documented in this file.

### \[2026-09-12]

#### 🔑 API runs now need a paid Apify plan

- **The Console stays free** — running this Actor from the Apify Console is unchanged, and so is starting it from an AI agent over MCP. Free plans keep their daily allowance and their row limit exactly as before.
- **Starting a run through the Apify API now requires a paid plan** — free-plan API runs stop immediately with a message explaining why, before anything is fetched or billed. Nothing is charged for a run that stops this way.
- **Why** — scripted free-plan API traffic was consuming the capacity paying customers rely on. Keeping it out protects run speed and availability for everyone on a paid plan.
- **If this affects you** — add credits or a payment method in Apify Console → Billing, and your existing API calls work again with no change to your input.

### \[2026-08-29]

#### 🎯 An account ID now matches exactly, or not at all

- **No more lookalike accounts** — a short account ID (`rmrbwx`) that does not match an account exactly used to fall back to the closest search result, so a typo or a retired ID quietly returned a *different* account's articles, billed as if you had asked for them. A short ID now has to match exactly.
- **A miss fails instead of substituting** — an ID that matches nothing returns a clear unbilled error row, so you find out immediately rather than discovering the wrong account in your export.
- **Nothing changes for valid input** — exact short IDs, `gh_...` IDs and account or article URLs all resolve exactly as before.

### \[2026-08-24]

#### 📊 A run report you can actually work from

- **Results at a glance** — every run now opens with the numbers that matter: rows delivered, rows billed, pages fetched and how long it took, with one click straight through to your dataset or a JSON/CSV download.
- **Itemized charges** — a plain statement of what this run cost, event by event, so the WeChat data you bought and the line on your invoice read the same.
- **One-click retry** — anything that did not come back is listed with the reason and a copy-ready input to fetch just those items. Failed rows and empty answers are never billed.
- **Copy-ready output** — article text, keyword suggestions and converted links each get a copy button, so a result can go straight into a brief, a sheet or an AI prompt.
- **Run it again from anywhere** — the report carries the exact request and the MCP client config for this run, so today's WeChat lookup becomes tomorrow's scheduled job or an AI agent task.

#### 💎 User Benefits

- See what a WeChat run produced, and what it cost, without opening a single row.
- Recover a partial run in one paste instead of rebuilding the input by hand.
- Hand a colleague or an agent the exact call that produced a dataset.

#### ✨ Clearer Console

- **Labelled everywhere** — operations, article and account columns, engagement counts and the run report now carry icons in the input form and dataset views, so the right field is easier to spot.
- **Run report in the Output tab** — the report sits alongside your dataset instead of hiding in storage.
- **Tier stated up front** — the run log now opens with your plan and its row limits, so a capped free run is never a surprise.

### \[2026-07-30]

- 🔧 **Historical Articles restored.** Account Historical Articles stopped returning rows on 2026-07-29 and works again. It now recovers on its own when a lookup goes quiet, so a bad hour no longer costs you the run.
- 📄 **Deeper history paging.** Page-by-page collection through an account's archive is now cursor-based, which walks further back reliably without repeating articles.

### \[2026-06-20]

- 🧯 **Graceful gateway-error handling.** A WeChat gateway page that comes back instead of the article is now retried, then reported in plain words. No more confusing parsing failures.

### \[2026-06-09]

#### 🎉 WeChat Official Account Data Scraper — Launch!

- **16 Operations In One** — search, accounts, articles, comments, engagement, and trends from a single WeChat Official Account (微信公众号) actor.
- **wxid-Native Account Resolution** — paste a short wxid (`rmrbwx`), a ghid (`gh_363b924965e9`), or an account URL; the actor resolves the rest automatically.
- **Article Search & Hot Article Search** — find WeChat articles by keyword or surface viral articles within any date range.
- **Account Intelligence** — account search, basic profile, principal/registration info, original-article count, today's articles, and full historical articles.
- **Engagement Metrics & Comment Threads** — read, like, looking, share, and collect counts plus top-level comments and nested replies.
- **Trend & Discovery Tools** — WeChat Index keyword-trend timeseries, search autocomplete suggestions, and mini-program search.

#### 💎 User Benefits

- Turn WeChat Official Accounts into clean, structured datasets with no login, cookies, or API key.
- One operation per run, one tidy dataset out — exportable as JSON, CSV, or Excel.
- Pay only for real results: empty WeChat responses are never billed.
- Built on WeChat's relaunched June 2026 data catalog for improved coverage and stability.

#### 🎯 Use Cases

- Marketing teams monitoring brand and competitor content across WeChat Official Accounts.
- Business development teams running account and KOL due diligence with registration intelligence.
- Content strategists measuring article engagement and reader sentiment.
- Market researchers mapping rising topics with WeChat Index trend signals.
- Data scientists building Chinese-language content corpora for downstream NLP.