I want to create a sister app at some point that will post topics on to the forum via an API user account - is there any info available on rate limits for this? Can we ‘trust’ certain accounts so that rate limits do not apply?

As far as I know, using an API key (generated in the admin interface) bypasses rate limits that are checked within the rails stack, e.g. limits on the number of posts. It will not bypass the general limit on the number of requests per second enforced by nginx, but most likely, that won’t be a probl…

You can explicitly bypass validations if you are using the API and API key, the limits in general will hold though.

I’m not too bothered by validations Sam, but by-passing rate limits for specific accounts could be helpful. Does the response include the specific error code if rate limits have been by-passed? That could be helpful if there’s no chance of including an option to by-pass…

I kind of worry about answering questions about problems that do not exist :blush: If you hit the limits let me know and let me know what errors you are getting

I did actually hit the limit previously - we currently have 6 monthly giveaways and every night a cron runs to check whether there is a ‘bonus day’, if there is, it posts an update on the forum. What I was finding was the crons running later weren’t posting. However I’ve since changed the cron jobs …

We use discourse via API from a Rails server. Which means all the traffic coming from one IP. We have enough traffic that it hits the rate limiter. I second the need for an API exception to this rate limit.

This might be a good one for you to comment on today @sam – are there limits for self hosters? do we have limits? how do we think about this now, since it has changed…

These days we have explicit global limits for API, however sometimes limits cascade. Certain controllers introduce limits, like maximum number of topics you can create per N seconds and so on. For trivial get requests you could lift the api rate limit way up and not hit any limits from Discourse. …

[image] sam: These days we have explicit global limits for API, however sometimes limits cascade. How would that impact an account wanting to post new topics or posts via its API Key Sam? [image] sam: For trivial get requests you could lift the api rate limit way up and not hit any limit…

I recommend reading through our rate limits here: config/discourse_defaults.conf 1f34f653b ### rate limits apply to all sites max_user_api_reqs_per_minute = 20 max_user_api_reqs_per_day = 2880 max_admin_api_reqs_per_key_…

Rate limits for API users

Development

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Available settings for global rate limits and throttling Self-Hosting reference	4	23197	November 2, 2025
Increase rate limit for API? Development rest-api	2	1108	February 20, 2024
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Enable user to Generate API key Feature	5	1598	May 14, 2018
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Rate limits for API users

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