# More detailed response for API /post\_actions failures
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [April 25, 2017, 12:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536 "2017-04-25T00:44:15Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kennym](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kennym)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2017, 12:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536/1 "2017-04-25T00:44:15Z")
**TL;DR; I want to submit a PR for `POST /post_actions` to be more verbose to an API user in order to reduce time debugging. As of now it only returns a 403 when a user couldn’t act upon a post.** Please read the rest of the post.
Today I was working on integrating likes for topics via the Discourse API, and spent too much time debugging the culprit. I was trying to like my post via the Discourse API:
I was doing a `POST /post_actions` with this payload
```
{
"id": 42,
"post_action_type_id": 2,
"flag_topic": false
}
```
as a user with trust level 2 and default Discourse settings for topics/posts; the post was owned by the user making the request, and it always returned a `HTTP 403` without any details.
At some point I tried liking the same post as a different API user, and it worked.
So, I figured it had to do something with this line: [discourse/app/controllers/post\_actions\_controller.rb at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/controllers/post_actions_controller.rb#L13)
I fired up `byebug` and eventually found that the culprit was this line: [discourse/lib/guardian/post\_guardian.rb at 5d9d2cf2871ce127c207f2efa192c2eb2eeb35f2 · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/5d9d2cf2871ce127c207f2efa192c2eb2eeb35f2/lib/guardian/post_guardian.rb#L36)
I can’t like my own posts via the API… how should I have known? The thing is I would never know via the API. Hence, I want to submit a PR, but my question is:
**How would you go on about this?**
There’s a lot of logic hidden inside of a method which only returns a boolean value, which doesn’t help the API user a lot: [discourse/lib/guardian/post\_guardian.rb at 5d9d2cf2871ce127c207f2efa192c2eb2eeb35f2 · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/5d9d2cf2871ce127c207f2efa192c2eb2eeb35f2/lib/guardian/post_guardian.rb#L6)
Paths:
1. (Simple) When responding with a 403 on Discourse to a request to `POST /post_actions`, add an additional message “There was an error when trying to act upon the post”
2. (Fancy) When responding with a 403 on Discourse to a request to `POST /post_actions`, with an additional message specifying the exact reason of failure.
3. (Admin only) Add debug outputs to logs about the failure reason. (Seems messy, and the API user still won’t be smarter, but at least an admin would)
Which path makes most sense?
_Poll ([view on site](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536/1))_
---
### Author:  [@zogstrip](https://meta.discourse.org/u/zogstrip)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2017, 7:47am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536/2 "2017-04-25T07:47:28Z")
**1)** doesn’t add any value over the **403**. So, if you’re up for it, go for **2)** 😉
---
### Author:  [@kennym](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kennym)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2017, 4:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536/3 "2017-04-25T16:40:05Z")
Path 2) is challenging… working on a PR 🙂
---
### Author:  [@kennym](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kennym)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2017, 5:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536/4 "2017-04-25T17:45:20Z")
Is there a compelling reason of why the validation of the [PostGuardian#post\_can\_act?](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/5d9d2cf2871ce127c207f2efa192c2eb2eeb35f2/lib/guardian/post_guardian.rb#L36) isn’t happening within the [PostAction#act](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/5d9d2cf2871ce127c207f2efa192c2eb2eeb35f2/app/models/post_action.rb#L255) class method?
/cc @zogstrip @eviltrout
---
### Author:  [@eviltrout](https://meta.discourse.org/u/eviltrout)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2017, 6:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/more-detailed-response-for-api-post-actions-failures/61536/5 "2017-04-25T18:07:12Z")
We often enforce things at a higher level. In this case post actions should all be created through the [PostActionCreator](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/lib/post_action_creator.rb) service object.