The FEP describes the limits of “a standard, newly registered account”. I think this does not work for a lot of servers:
- Servers with closed registration, like single-user instances, invite-only servers or personal sites, have no newly registered account to describe.
- On servers where posting or uploading depends on the role of an account, the baseline account can be very limited. On WordPress, for example, a newly registered account is a subscriber by default, and subscribers can’t post or upload at all. So the document would say max_attachments: 0, which is correct, but useless for the authors and editors who actually use a client.
The FEP already says that some accounts may have different limits and that it does not express those. I think that is the case clients care about most. Two ideas:
- define the baseline as “an account that is allowed to post”, or
- allow the configuration document to vary when the request is authenticated (with Vary: Authorization), so a client gets the limits of the account it is logged in with.
The second option is probably closer to what clients need, but it changes the “same document for everyone” rule.