/lobsters/users

POST /api/lobsters/users

Price: 1 credit

Get one Lobsters member: join date, karma, avatar, self-description, admin and moderator status, the member who invited them, and their linked GitHub and Mastodon handles

How to use it

Usernames are case-sensitive, so take one from `author` on a story or comment rather than reconstructing it — a wrong case is a 412. `karma` was absent for the one site administrator observed, so a missing karma is not a zero-karma account. `invited_by` is populated for almost every member because Lobsters is invite-only, and it chains: the inviter is itself a username you can pass back here.

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• user string required — Lobsters username, or any lobste.rs profile URL (examples: "pushcx", "~Irene", "https://lobste.rs/~Irene"; minLength: 1)

Response

• @type string (default: "LobstersUser")
• alias string required
• url string nullable
• image string nullable
• created_at integer nullable
• karma integer nullable
• about string nullable
• about_html string nullable
• is_admin boolean nullable
• is_moderator boolean nullable
• invited_by string nullable
• invited_by_url string nullable
• github_username string nullable
• mastodon_username string nullable

Errors

• 422 — user is not a Lobsters username or profile URL Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — No such Lobsters member Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.