Docs on rate limits for POST requests

[JLarky]

Hi.

I don’t like how documentation of rate limits are structured right now. Thing that bothers me is pages like this https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/post/direct_messages/new have nice line “Rate Limited? Yes” and this link contains information only about how POST requests are counted together between other apps, but there’s no information about what those limits are, same goes with https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting/1.1/limits which don’t have any POST endpoints at all. It’s funny because you recommend to use https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/users/lookup with POST and this request will work just as GET returning x-rate-limit-remaining and stuff.

[episod]

Hi there,

It was a documentation error for direct_messages/new to say rate limited: true – it’s not rate limited. Thanks for pointing that out.

Most POSTs on the API are to change or create data – to tweet, to retweet, to delete, to favorite, etc. All of these actions are not rate limited in the API but instead are account-based allowances that transcend the API.

Some of our information retrieval methods support both GET and POST, but they aren’t write operations. In the case of using a POST on one of the few “read” methods supporting it, the rate limit is essentially the same as if you were making a GET. They are the same API resource, you’re just calling it with a different HTTP method.

Some day in the future, write operations will likely also have rate limits and account “allowances” will become a concept of the past. At that time, write operations would include similar limit definitions as the read operations. Until then, you should just assume that the limits for write operations are always unknown to you.