You will have people complain about their anti-fingerprinting being blocked with every bot-managment solution. Your ability to navigate the internet anonymously is directly correlated with a bots ability to scrape. That has never been my complaint about Anubis.

My complaint is that the calculations Anubis forces you to do are absolutely negligible burden for a bot to solve. The hardest part is just having a JavaScript interpreter available. Making the author of the scraper write custom code to deal with your website is the most effective way to prevent bots.

Think about how much computing power AI data centers have. Do you think they give a shit about hashing some values for Anubis? No. They burn more compute power than a thousand Anubis challenges generating a single llm answer. PoW is a backwards solution.

Please Think. Captchas worked because they’re supposed to be hard for a computer to solve but are easy for a human. PoW is the opposite.

In the current shape Anubis has zero impact on usability for 99% of the site visitors, not so with meta refresh.

Again, I ask you: What extra burden does meta-refresh impose on users? How does setting a cookie and immediately refreshing the page burden the user more than making them wait longer while draining their battery before doing the exact same thing? Its strictly less intrusive.

And how do you actually check for working JS in a way that can’t be easily spoofed? Hint: PoW is a good way to do that.

Accessing the browsers API in any way is way harder to spoof than some hashing. I already suggested checking if the browser has graphics acceleration. That would filter out the vast majority of headless browsers too. PoW is just math and is easy to spoof without running any JavaScript. You can even do it faster than real JavaScript users something like Rust or C.

Meta refresh is a downgrade in usability for everyone but a tiny minority that has disabled JS.

What are you talking about? It just refreshes the page without doing any of the extra computation that PoW does. What extra burden does it put on users?

You are arguing a strawman. Anubis works because because most AI scrapers (currently) don’t want to spend extra on running headless chromium

WTF, That’s what I already said? That was my entire point from the start!? You don’t need PoW to force headless usage. Any JavaScript challenge will suffice. I even said the Meta Refresh challenge Anubis provides is sufficient and explicitly recommended it.

Its like you didn’t understand anything I said. Anubis does work. I said it works. But it works because most AI crawlers don’t have a headless browser to solve the PoW. To operate efficiently at the high volume required, they use raw http requests. The vast majority are probably using basic python requests module.

You don’t need PoW to throttle general access to your site and that’s not the fundamental assumption of PoW. PoW assumes (incorrectly) that bots won’t pay the extra flops to scrape the website. But bots are paid to scape the website users aren’t. They’ll just scale horizontally and open more parallel connections. They have the money.

I’ve repeatedly stated this before: Proof of Work bot-management is only Proof of Javascript bot-management. It is nothing to a headless browser to by-pass. Proof of JavaScript does work and will stop the vast majority of bot traffic. That’s how Anubis actually works. You don’t need to punish actual users by abusing their CPU. POW is a far higher cost on your actual users than the bots.

Last I checked Anubis has an JavaScript-less strategy called “Meta Refresh”. It first serves you a blank HTML page with a <meta> tag instructing the browser to refresh and load the real page. I highly advise using the Meta Refresh strategy. It should be the default.

I’m glad someone is finally making an open source and self hostable bot management solution. And I don’t give a shit about the cat-girls, nor should you. But Techaro admitted they had little idea what they were doing when they started and went for the “nuclear option”. Fuck Proof of Work. It was a Dead On Arrival idea decades ago. Techaro should strip it from Anubis.

I haven’t caught up with what’s new with Anubis, but if they want to get stricter bot-management, they should check for actual graphics acceleration.