[jurialmunkey]

my mistake i thought i was on a community forum where ideas can and should be shared for the betterment of the community

i will not offer any further input to your project

I'm not trying to be a dick or discourage contributions but the rate limits are important and not something I've implemented arbirtrarily.

If my API key suddenly starts excessively and repeatedly hitting these free services because of unlimited requests, then these free services will disable my API key. It's as simple as that. Then no one can use the plugin.

These services like TMDb and FanartTV provide their API data for free. TMDbHelper has over 100k daily unique users. Without limits, the request numbers start getting out of hand quickly. Even a small increase of 10 requests per user means TMDbHelper is generating an extra 1 million requests per day.

And I'm not saying these things as some hypothetical. It happened to marcelveldt with SkinHelper originally where some of his keys were disabled for exactly this reason and then he was forced to implement really strict rate limiting to get them back online. It's also the reason Trakt disabled artwork requests via their API in 2016.