Protecting Our Server from AI Scrapers: The Anubis Solution

You are seeing this message because our administrator has set up an additional layer of protection on our server to safeguard against the increasing threat of AI-powered website scrapers. This measure, known as Anubis, is designed to prevent these automated programs from overloading our resources and making them inaccessible to legitimate users.

Anubis is a Proof-of-Work scheme that uses a similar concept to Hashcash, a proposed method for reducing email spam. In theory, this additional load should be insignificant at the individual level, but when applied to large-scale scrapers, it becomes prohibitively expensive and discourages malicious activity.

However, as is often the case with hastily developed solutions, Anubis has its limitations. At its core, it's a temporary fix designed to allow more time for researchers to develop a more sophisticated solution that can identify headless browsers (e.g., those used by popular web scraping tools) and prevent them from bypassing the challenge.

For our website, we're currently running Anubis version 1.21.3. To proceed, you'll need to enable JavaScript on your device. Unfortunately, this means that plugins like JShelter will no longer be effective at blocking this challenge. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and encourage users to disable these plugins temporarily to access our content.

It's worth noting that a no-JS solution is still in the works, but it's proving to be more challenging than anticipated due to changes in how website hosting has evolved with the rise of AI. Our team is working diligently to develop an alternative solution that doesn't rely on JavaScript, but for now, this requires your cooperation.

We appreciate your understanding and patience as we navigate these complex issues. If you have any questions or concerns about Anubis or our efforts to combat website scraping, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.