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…

it seems reasonable to include access to about.json, I’ve opened a PR and will run this by the team DEV: allow granular api keys access to about.json (#38948) main ← dev-about-api-scope opened 01:5…

[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.

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

2 Likes

Topic		Replies	Views
User API keys specification Integrations rest-api , reference	70	35122	September 22, 2025
Allow API use by regular users, not just admins Dev rest-api	7	1296	April 29, 2023
Access via Discourse API, key and/or user rejected Dev rest-api	2	850	December 1, 2023
403 error when connecting Zapier to Discourse Support	14	912	October 25, 2020
Get an API key's scopes and user level via the API Dev rest-api	0	597	November 16, 2023

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

Related topics