We’ve been setting up the Discourse MCP server to connect our Discourse instance to Claude Desktop via config files. When using a single-use API key with granular access controls, the MCP server throws a 403 Forbidden error because it can’t read about.json. Snippet from the Console Logs [2026-03-1…

[image] aangi: The API username or key is invalid Also, is this a misleading error we can improve?

Hi Michael, it does seem like a misleading error. However, because we cannot change the scope of the user once its been created, it is possible that in case of granular access, the API username is being rendered invalid because there is no about.json file.

Hi @awesomerobot @supermathie any update on this?

I’ve merged the change, so once it hits tests-passed you can rebuild and pull in the updated version and everything should work.

API user with granular access cannot read about.json | Discourse MCP

Support

awesomerobot (Kris) March 28, 2026, 2:00pm 3

it seems reasonable to include access to about.json, I’ve opened a PR and will run this by the team

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/38948

Topic		Replies	Views
User API keys specification Integrations rest-api , reference	69	35939	September 22, 2025
Allow API use by regular users, not just admins Development rest-api	6	1375	February 14, 2023
Access via Discourse API, key and/or user rejected Development rest-api	2	880	December 1, 2023
Get an API key's scopes and user level via the API Development rest-api	0	622	November 16, 2023
403 error when connecting Zapier to Discourse Support	13	930	September 25, 2020

API user with granular access cannot read about.json | Discourse MCP

Related topics