Flag submission rate limiting with admin WebSocket alerts - #15
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May 17, 2026 11:18
The database config now has a new section:
rate_limit:
grace_period: 5.0 # minutes — required to activate
# rate: 5.0 # default
# burst: 10.0 # default
Once a team is detected to breach the limit, a websocket admin "blocked"
event is emitted. It is unblocked, once the grace period is over, a
"unblocked" event is emitted for that team.
Signed-off-by: David Goulet <dgoulet@riseup.net>
This allows to hook a script to a specific websocket event:
askgod admin monitor-hook --event ratelimit /path/to/ban.sh
askgod admin monitor-hook --event ratelimit,flags /path/to/handler.sh
The script receives the full event JSON on stdin for every matching event:
{
"server": "askgod",
"type": "flags",
"timestamp": "...",
"metadata": {
"team": { "id": 3, "name": "TeamFoo", ... },
"type": "blocked"
}
}
Signed-off-by: David Goulet <dgoulet@riseup.net>
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A per-team token-bucket rate limiter sits in front of the flag submission handler. When a team exhausts their token
bucket, they receive HTTP 429 responses for the duration of a configurable grace period. The limiter tracks four
states to minimize event noise:
through
Rate and burst default to 5 req/s and a burst of 10 so the limiter works out of the box, but all three parameters
are in the live-reloadable config section so they can be tuned during an event without a server restart.
New config section (api/config.go)
rate_limit:
rate: 5.0 # tokens refilled per second (default: 5)
burst: 10.0 # max burst before tripping (default: 10)
grace_period: 5.0 # minutes blocked after first breach (required to enable)
Rate limiting is disabled when grace_period is not set, so existing deployments are unaffected.
EventRateLimit is emitted on the existing flags admin channel with type: "blocked" or "unblocked", so any existing
flag monitor clients receive these events without needing to subscribe to a new channel.
Admin hook command (cmd/askgod)
askgod admin monitor-hook --event ratelimit /path/to/script.sh
Connects to the requested event channels and invokes the given script for every matching event, with the full event
JSON on stdin. Multiple event types can be combined (--event ratelimit,flags).