Gotchas

What trips up API clients: session-only routes, error texts, rate limits and draft visibility.

Session-only routes

An API key cannot call these routes. They answer 403 with a plain-text body and no JSON:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

This action needs a real session.

/v1/api-key/*, /v1/system/*, POST /v1/auth/verify, DELETE /v1/auth/register.
Every activity route under /v1/activity.
Writes on sites (POST, PATCH, DELETE under /v1/site, so a key cannot create a site) and on authors (POST, PATCH, DELETE under /v1/author).
PATCH /v1/settings.

Variant routes under /v1/media/{id}/variants answer 401 to a key instead. The sign-in routes (login, logout, register, password reset) ignore a key and give no 403.

When a task needs one of these routes, stop and tell the user to do it in the app. Do not try to log in with a password.

Error texts are plain text

Errors are not JSON. The body is one sentence; branch on the status code, and show the sentence to the user.

Status	Typical text
`400`	`The request cannot be processed due to a mismatch in the format of the body.`
`401`	`You must be logged in to access this resource.`
`403`	`This action needs a real session.`, `Only the owner can do this.`, `Only owners and admins can do this.`, `You must verify your account to access this resource.`
`404`	`Article not found`, `Image not found`
`429`	`Too many requests. Please try again later.`

An invalid, unknown, expired or revoked key answers 401, even on public routes. It is never treated as anonymous.

Rate limit: 429

Each key may make 120 requests per minute. The 429 response carries a Retry-After header holding the seconds to wait:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 46

Too many requests. Please try again later.

Sleep for Retry-After seconds, then retry once. Do not retry in a tight loop. Prefer one list call with size=100 over many single reads.

Draft versus online

Anonymous callers and unverified users only see online articles. A draft answers 404 with Article not found, the same as an id that does not exist.
A verified session or a key sees drafts as well. In lists, counts.draft is 0 for anonymous callers and status=draft answers an empty page.
POST /v1/article/ always creates a draft. Publishing is a separate call, PATCH /v1/article/{id}/publish.
Sitemaps list online articles only.

Writes

A title cannot be changed after creation. Create a new article instead.
PATCH /v1/article/{id} accepts body, site_id, author_ids and the SEO fields only. {} and null values answer 400, except cover_image_id and social_image_id, where null removes the image.
Request bodies are HTML even though responses default to markdown. Send <p> and <h2>, not markdown syntax, or it is stored literally.
Ids in paths are unsigned integers. Anything else answers 400.

Permissions follow the key's creator

A key acts as the user who made it. A key made by a user who is neither owner nor admin cannot do what only owners and admins can, and it answers 403 Only owners and admins can do this. Check GET /v1/auth/me to read the role of the key.

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