trentmkelly/dread-crime-forum

Dread Forum Archive

A near-complete capture of public content from Dread, a Reddit-style discussion forum hosted as a Tor hidden service. Dread is one of the longest-running darknet community forums and a primary site for discussion of darknet markets, operational security, cryptocurrency, and related topics.

The archive covers content posted between April 2018 and September 2025 and is structured as three Parquet-backed splits: posts, comments, and users (with parsed PGP key metadata).

Dataset Statistics

Split	Rows	Description
posts	715,877	All discoverable posts across 2,272 subdreads
comments	3,702,685	All comments on captured posts
users	258,848	All users observed as post or comment authors

Coverage notes:

• Subdreads scraped: 2,271 / 2,272 (one excluded, see scraper notes)
• Posts with full body captured: 714,841. The remaining 1,036 are flagged unreachable in the source data and appear in the dump with body_html and body_text set to null.
• Distinct comment authors: 209,359
• Distinct post authors: 24,726

PGP keys (parsed from each user's /u/<name>/pgp page):

• Users with a published, ownership-verified PGP key: 25,449
• Users without a published key: 233,399

Every user with has_key = true is also marked ownership_verified = true - Dread only displays an armored key block on a profile after the user proves possession of the corresponding private key.

File Schemas

posts

Field	Type	Notes
post_key	string	Stable Dread identifier; primary key
title	string	Post title
author	string	Username of the original poster
subdread	string	Subdread (community) name, without the d/ prefix
url	string	Path on Dread (e.g. /post/<post_key>)
comment_count	integer	Comment count as displayed on the listing
vote_count	integer	Net vote count as displayed
posted_text	string	Human-readable timestamp as displayed (e.g. 3 days ago)
posted_date	string	Resolved date string when available
body_html	string	Raw HTML of the post body (null if body was not captured)
body_text	string	Plain-text rendering of the body (null if not captured)

comments

Field	Type	Notes
comment_key	string	Stable identifier; primary key
post_key	string	Foreign key to posts.post_key
parent_comment_key	string / null	Foreign key to the parent comment, or null for top-level replies (children of the post itself). Use this together with post_key to reconstruct the full reply tree.
author	string	Commenter's username
vote_count	integer	Net vote count
posted_date	string	Resolved date string
body_html	string	Raw HTML of the comment body
body_text	string	Plain-text rendering
depth	integer	Reply depth in the thread (0 = top-level reply to the post)

In this dump, only 96 comments (~0.003% of the total) have depth > 0 with parent_comment_key = null - these are orphans whose position in the tree could not be confirmed against the live thread page. Every other non-top-level comment links to a parent.

users

Field	Type	Notes
username	string	Dread username; primary key
has_key	bool / null	Whether a PGP key block was published on the user's profile
ownership_verified	bool / null	Whether Dread displays the "Ownership of this key has been verified" badge
pgp_key	string / null	The full ASCII-armored OpenPGP public key, exactly as published
fingerprint	string / null	Primary key fingerprint
primary_key_id	string / null	OpenPGP long key ID for the primary key
key_algorithm	string / null	OpenPGP algorithm code (e.g. 1 = RSA, 22 = EdDSA)
key_bits	integer / null	Key length in bits where applicable
key_created	string / null	ISO-8601 creation timestamp
key_expires	string / null	ISO-8601 expiry timestamp, if set
user_ids	array / null	Parsed UID records: {raw, name, comment, email}
names	array / null	Distinct names extracted from UIDs
emails	array / null	Distinct emails extracted from UIDs
fingerprints	array / null	All fingerprints (primary plus subkeys)
key_ids	array / null	All long key IDs (primary plus subkeys)

For users without a published key, all PGP-related fields are null.

How the Data Was Collected

Pages were fetched directly over Tor from dreadytofatroptsdj6io7l3xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion using a SOCKS5 connector with per-stream circuit isolation. Only public, server-rendered content is included. Drafts, private messages, and any account-only views are not present.

Considerations for Using the Data

Dread is a darknet community forum. The corpus contains substantial discussion of illicit topics including drug markets, vendor reviews, fraud, and operational security, alongside ordinary social conversation. Researchers should expect:

• Strong language, slurs, and harassment
• Detailed descriptions of illegal activity
• Discussion of vendors, marketplaces, and substances
• Personally selected pseudonyms; some users link real names or contact addresses in their PGP UIDs

PGP UIDs frequently contain self-published email addresses and names - these are included verbatim because they are part of the public key as Dread served it. Treat them as user-published metadata, not as verified identities.

License

This dataset is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit and distribute any derivative works under the same license.

Citation

If you use this dataset in academic or other published work, please cite:

@misc{kelly2026dread,
  author       = {Kelly, Trent},
  title        = {Dread Crime Forum},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/trentmkelly/dread-crime-forum}}
}