specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
source: >-
  response-header inspection of https://sourcebook.acus.gov/api.php and
  https://sourcebook.acus.gov/rest.php/v1/*, plus robots.txt on www.acus.gov,
  eaja.acus.gov and sourcebook.acus.gov, all 2026-08-30
provider: Administrative Conference of the United States
providerId: administrative-conference-of-the-united-states
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-08-30'
tags:
  - Federal Government
  - Administrative Law
  - Open Data
  - Rate Limiting
description: >-
  ACUS publishes no rate limits. This artifact replaces a 2026-05-04 bulk-sweep scaffold
  that asserted free/professional/enterprise tiers, X-RateLimit-* headers and per-minute
  quotas — none of which ACUS has ever published or emitted. Every value below was either
  observed on the wire or is recorded as absent.
limit_count: 0
headers:
  observed: []
  note: >-
    No X-RateLimit-*, no RateLimit-* (RFC 9331 draft), no Retry-After and no
    RateLimit-Policy header appeared on any probed response from any acus.gov host.
    Headers actually returned by the Sourcebook API are cache and trace headers only:
    x-request-id, etag, last-modified, cache-control, vary, x-content-type-options,
    x-frame-options.
responseCodes:
  throttled: null
  quotaExceeded: null
  note: >-
    No 429 was observed and none is documented. The only non-200 status reliably produced
    at the edge is 403, and that is User-Agent based rather than volume based — see
    errors/administrative-conference-of-the-united-states-problem-types.yml.
limits: []
published_throttling_signals:
  - type: robots-crawl-delay
    host: www.acus.gov
    url: https://www.acus.gov/robots.txt
    status: 200
    value: 'Crawl-delay: 2 (SeekportBot only; no directive for User-agent: *)'
  - type: robots-crawl-delay
    host: eaja.acus.gov
    url: https://eaja.acus.gov/robots.txt
    status: 200
    value: 'Crawl-delay: 2 for User-agent: *'
  - type: robots-crawl-delay
    host: sourcebook.acus.gov
    url: https://sourcebook.acus.gov/robots.txt
    status: 200
    value: 'Crawl-delay: 2 for User-agent: *'
  - type: robots-disallow
    hosts: [www.acus.gov, eaja.acus.gov, sourcebook.acus.gov]
    value: 'MJ12bot: Disallow: /'
policies:
  - name: Crawl delay is the only stated pacing guidance
    description: >-
      In the absence of any documented API limit, a 2-second delay between requests — the
      Crawl-delay the agency publishes for general crawlers — is the only pacing signal
      ACUS gives. MediaWiki's own convention of batching with `continue` and honouring
      ETag/Last-Modified applies.
  - name: Corpus size makes throttling largely moot
    description: >-
      The Sourcebook wiki holds 30 pages, 21 content articles and 0 files
      (siprop=statistics, 2026-08-30). A complete harvest is a handful of requests, so
      well-behaved clients will never approach any plausible limit.
agent_note: >-
  The practical access constraint on ACUS data is not rate limiting; it is the edge's
  blanket HTTP 403 for non-browser User-Agents, which stops a default HTTP client at
  request one.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    X-twitter: apievangelist
    email: info@apievangelist.com