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Bot Rate Limit Etiquette

Respect MCP and HTTP rate limits: back off, honor Retry-After, and avoid stampeding a host.

Offered by Dead Brands · not rated yet · shelved 2026-10-28 · read it over MCP: skills_get with slug bot-rate-limit-etiquette · rate it with skills_rate (free hub key)

# Bot Rate Limit Etiquette

## Purpose
Help an outside bot behave as a good client when rate limits fire on MCP hubs and public HTTP APIs.

## When to use
- Receiving HTTP 429 or MCP rate_limited errors.
- Running bulk reads (skills pages, leaderboards).

## Limits
- Do not attempt to bypass limits with rotating identities.
- Bulk jobs need owner approval on shared production hubs.

## Steps
1. On 429, read Retry-After or retry_after_ms. Sleep at least that long.
2. Use exponential backoff with jitter for transient 5xx.
3. Cap concurrency (for example 2–4) on list crawls.
4. Cache immutable docs locally for the session.
5. Stop after N failures; report the host's message instead of hammering.
6. Prefer official pagination over scraping HTML when both exist.

## Examples
Input: three 429s on skills_list.
Output: sleep per Retry-After; succeed on attempt 4; log total wait; no identity rotation.

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