Download quotas (daily limits per role) Pro

Access rules decide who can download a document. Quotas decide how much: FileDeck Pro can give each user role — and logged-out visitors — a daily download ceiling. Use it to stop bulk scraping of a public library, or to meter a members’ resource area.

FileDeck Pro — this feature is included in all Pro plans. See pricing

Set the limits

1. Go to Documents → Settings → Downloads.
2. Under Daily download limits, enter a number for any role you want to meter, and/or for Visitors (not logged in).
3. Leave a field blank for unlimited. Save changes.

How the limits behave

• Limits are per person per day (UTC). Logged-in users are counted by account; visitors are counted by IP address.
• A user with several roles gets the most permissive of them — if any of their roles is unmetered, they’re unlimited.
• Over the limit, the download is refused with a polite message: "You’ve reached today’s download limit (N). The limit resets tomorrow."
• Each file inside a multi-select zip counts against the quota, so a zip can’t be used to sidestep the limit — documents over the limit are left out of the archive.
• Signed share links are exempt, consistent with the rest of FileDeck: a share link you minted carries its own authorisation and expiry.

Per-document download limits (expire after N downloads)

Separate from the per-person quotas above, a single document can carry its own lifetime download ceiling: edit the document and set Download limit in the Document Controls box. Once the document’s total download count reaches the limit, every further download is refused with "This document has reached its download limit" — for everyone, signed share links included. That’s deliberate: like an expiry date, a spent document is document lifecycle, not per-visitor authorisation.

The field shows the count so far next to it; raise or clear the limit at any time to reopen the document. Typical uses: a giveaway capped at the first N takers, a licence limited to a known number of copies, or a time-boxed release where "gone when it’s gone" is the point.

What quotas are (and aren’t) for

Quotas are a fairness and anti-scraping tool. They don’t replace access control — a document that shouldn’t be public should be restricted, not merely metered. FileDeck also applies its own per-IP request throttling underneath, independent of quotas.

Notes

• No new personal data is stored: counters are daily keys by user ID or a hash of the IP, and expire automatically.
• Developers can veto or allow any download with the filedeck_download_allowed filter (return true or a WP_Error).