Mark certain users as API users, immune to certain posting limits

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

A proposal is being considered to allow certain users, specifically automated systems, to be immune from default posting limits such as minimum topic and post lengths. This would enable staff-validated bot accounts to post content without character limits without requiring admin privileges. Currently, bot accounts are often marked as admins to bypass post limits, but this gives them excessive power. featheredtoast suggests this proposal would allow scaling down permissions to normal user level while lifting post limits. sam notes that this relates to upcoming API key scoping work by @david, which could achieve similar functionality by scoping down API keys to specific routes. featheredtoast agrees, considering this an additional API scope request.

1

Considering a proposal to allow certain users the ability to be immune from some of the default posting limits - specifically minimum topic and post lengths.

This would allow some (admin-approved) automated systems that hook into Discourse to post content from a separate platform without any additional restrictions by Discourse. Special automatic posting privileges would no longer need to handle title too long/short while still requiring the rest of the community to adhere to posting standards.

For example, I’ve got a Hubot plugin that might want to post or reply without character limits without the account tied to Hubot being tied to an admin account itself. It would be a user account that is validated by staff but without additional privileges itself.

The current way of doing this is to mark the bot account as an admin to bypass the post limits, but also gives the user account way too much power than it actually needs. This proposal would make it possible to scale down the permissions to that of a normal user, just with the additional post limits lifted.

5 Likes
3

To me this relates heavily to @david’s upcoming work of scoping api keys. In this case you could make hubot admin but scope the key down to very specific routes. It is very close to your request here and functionally equiv.

7 Likes
4

Oh right, that does fit pretty perfectly in with the API work - In that case, consider this an additional API scope request then :wink:

6 Likes