This dataset contains publicly available posts from the Sanctioned Suicide online forum, a XenForo-based community centered on discussion of suicide. The data was collected for epidemiological research examining the role of online communities in shaping mental health outcomes among at-risk populations.

The dataset contains 159,803 threads and 1,862,911 posts from the forum's "Suicide Discussion" subforum, provided in two formats:

Raw HTML: Full page dumps of every forum listing page and every thread page, preserving the original markup for downstream researchers who may wish to extract additional data or re-parse with different tools.
Parsed JSON: One JSON file per thread, containing structured data extracted from the HTML.

Each JSON record contains:

Thread metadata: title, thread ID, URL
Post data: post ID, timestamp, content (HTML and plaintext), post position, edit timestamps
Author metadata: username, user ID, user title/flair, join date, message count at time of posting
Engagement data: reaction types (Like, Love, Hugs, etc.), reactor usernames

Collection Method

Content was scraped from the publicly accessible (no authentication required) clearnet version of the forum using standard HTTP requests. Forum listing pages were paginated to discover threads; individual thread pages were downloaded and parsed using BeautifulSoup. No login credentials were used and no access controls were bypassed.

Legal Basis

All data in this dataset was collected from publicly accessible web pages that required no authentication, account creation, or circumvention of access controls. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Van Buren v. United States (2021) affirmed that accessing publicly available data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Ninth Circuit's ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (2022) further established that scraping publicly accessible websites does not constitute unauthorized access under the CFAA. This collection was conducted for nonprofit academic research purposes.

Access Restrictions

This dataset is available under a gated access model. Requests will be manually reviewed. Approval is generally limited to individuals affiliated with academic or government research institutions.

By requesting access, you agree to the following:

The dataset will be used solely for research purposes (e.g., public health, computational social science, platform governance studies).
No attempts will be made to deanonymize, contact, or identify individuals in the dataset.
The dataset will not be redistributed outside your immediate research group.
Any published work using this dataset will adhere to applicable institutional ethics review requirements.

Ethical Considerations

This dataset contains distressing content including descriptions of suicidal ideation, self-harm, and crisis. The individuals represented are members of a vulnerable population. Researchers should:

Obtain appropriate IRB or ethics board approval before use.
Exercise care in quoting or reproducing individual posts in publications.
Consider the potential for re-identification when reporting findings, even when usernames are pseudonymous.
Be mindful of their own well-being when working with this material.

Citation

If you use this dataset in published research, please cite it as follows:

@misc{kelly2026sanctionedsuicide,
  author = {Kelly, Trent},
  title = {Sanctioned Suicide Forum Dataset},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/trentmkelly/sanctioned-suicide-forum-scrape}
}