# Changelog of Federal Register Monitor 📜 (new rules & notices alerts) (`tagadanar/federal-register-monitor`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/tagadanar/federal-register-monitor/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/tagadanar/federal-register-monitor.md

## Changelog

### 2026-09-08

- **A run can no longer spend more time than it has.** The retry ladder booked
  its worst case up front — five attempts at a 30-second timeout plus up to 31
  seconds of backoff, about 181 seconds for a single request — under a paging
  loop with no ceiling and an unbounded keyword list. Because this actor read
  every page BEFORE pushing anything, a run killed by the platform timeout
  delivered nothing at all and could not even say why.
- Every request now plans against the time actually left, a backoff that would
  outlive the budget is not slept, and a run that hits its limit ships every
  document it did read, then says plainly that the result is PARTIAL — never
  that nothing matched, which is a claim it has not earned.
- A query rejected by the API (a 4xx that is not a rate limit) now leaves the
  ladder immediately instead of being retried five times.

### 2026-08-30

- New input **Significant documents only**: keep just the documents whose
  associated Unified Agenda entry is deemed significant under Executive Order
  12866\. It is the Federal Register's own flag (`conditions[significant]=1`),
  verified live against the API — a 30-day window goes from 2,103 documents to
  31, and EPA + FDA + SEC rules over 90 days from 1,126 to 11. A document with
  no Unified Agenda entry is never flagged, so the view is deliberately narrow. The parameter is only ever sent when
  you switch it on, because the API reads any other value as "not significant"
  and would silently drop every document whose flag is unset.
- Every run now finishes with a status message that says what actually
  happened, chosen from counters rather than from an empty dataset. A run that
  returned nothing now distinguishes: the API never answered; the API answered
  but reported an empty Federal Register on a no-filter control query (an
  upstream change, ours to fix, never blamed on your search); nothing was
  published in your scope; the monitor seeded its baseline; the monitor found
  nothing new. Previously an empty result either failed the run outright or
  left the run card blank.

### 2026-08-19

- The User-Agent contact is now the actor's own Apify URL instead of an email
  address. Same identification, same reachability (the actor page's Issues tab),
  no published mailbox.

### 2026-07-13

- README: actor-start fee corrected from the old $0.00005 default to the live $0.001 floor, and the "no minimum" claim removed.

### 2026-07-12

- Invalid input no longer fails the run. The run now finishes cleanly with a clear explanation in its status message, so a typo or an empty list is easy to spot and fix.
- List inputs now accept datasets piped straight from another scraper: entries
  that are objects are read through their usual key names (url/link,
  query/keyword/title, name/company and similar) instead of being rejected.

### 2026-07-11

- Billing: on paid runs every row is billed before it is written, and a run
  now stops visibly if billing fails instead of continuing unbilled.

### 2026-07-09

- Initial public release on Apify Store.
- Watch US rulemaking on the official Federal Register v1 API by agency, keyword/topic and document type (final rules, proposed rules, notices, presidential documents).
- Multiple keywords are OR-combined; agency names are converted to slugs automatically.
- Monitor mode: persistent seen-set returns only new documents since the last run, with a Slack-compatible webhook digest.
- Input is tolerant of common shapes (a bare string / bare object / delimited string for list fields is coerced into a list). Empty scope still errors.
- Official Federal Register API, no API key.