Anubis is an elegant solution to the ai bot scraper issue, I just wish the solution to everything wasn't just spending compute everywhere. In a world where we need to rethink our energy consumption and generation, even on clients, this is a stupid use of computing power.

I don't think you have a usecase for Anubis.

Anubis is mainly aimed against bad AI scrappers and some ddos mitigation if you have a heavy service.

You are getting hit exactly the same, anubis doesn't put up a block list or anything. It just put itself in front of the service. The load on your server and the risk you take it's very similar anubis or not anubis here. Most bots are not AI scrappers they are just proving. So the hit on your server is the same.

What you want is to properly set up fail2ban or, even better, crowdsec. That would actually block and ban bots that try to prove your server.

If you are just self-hosting with Anubis the only thing you are doing is deriving the log noise towards Anubis logs and making your devices do a PoW every once in a while when you want to use your services.

Being honest I don't know what you are self hosting. But at least it's something that's going to get ddos or AI scrapped, there's not much point with Anubis.

Also Anubis is not a substitute for fail2ban or crowdsec. You need something to detect and ban brute force attacks. If not the attacker would only need to execute the anubis challenge get the token for the week and then they are free to attack your services as they like.

The creator is active on a professional slack I'm on and they're lovely and receptive to user feedback. Their tool is very popular in the online archives/cultural heritage scene (we combine small budgets and juicy, juicy data).

My site has enabled js-free screening when the site load is low, under the theory that if the site load is too high then no one's getting in anyway.

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.

I host my main server on my own hardware, and a VPN on Hetzner because my shitty ISP doesn't let me port forward. For the past year, bots were hitting my Forgejo instance hard. I forgot to disable registration and they generated hundreds of accounts with hundreds of repos with sketchy links, generating terrabytes of traffic from my VPS, costing me money in traffic. I disabled registration and deleted the spam, and bots still kept hitting my server for several months, which would cause memory leaks over time and crash it and consume CPU, and still costed me money with terrabytes of traffic per month. A few weeks ago, I put Anubis on the VPS. Now, zero bots hit my Forgejo instance and I don't pay for their traffic anymore. Problem solved.

Kinda sucks how it makes websites inaccessible to folks who have to disable JavaScript for security.

Honestly im not a big fan of anubis . it fucks users with slow devices

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html

Stop playing wack-a-mole with these fucking people and build TARPITS!

Make it HURT to crawl your site illegitimately.

I don't mind Anubis but the challenge page shouldn't really load an image. It's wasting extra bandwidth for nothing.

Just parse the challenge and move on.

Unrelated but one day I won't get gender envy from random cartoon woman

I appreciate a simple piece of software that does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

yes, please be mindful when using cloudflare. with them you’re possibly inviting in a much much bigger problem

https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare

Counterpoint: Anubis is not awesome: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html

At the time of commenting, this post is 8h old. I read all the top comments, many of them critical of Anubis.

I run a small website and don't have problems with bots. Of course I know what a DDOS is - maybe that's the only use case where something like Anubis would help, instead of the strictly server-side solution I deploy?

I use CrowdSec (it seems to work with caddy btw). It took a little setting up, but it does the job.
(I think it's quite similar to fail2ban in what it does, plus community-updated blocklists)

Am I missing something here? Why wouldn't that be enough? Why do I need to heckle my visitors?

Despite all that I still had a problem with bots knocking on my ports spamming my logs.

By the time Anubis gets to work, the knocking already happened so I don't really understand this argument.

If the system is set up to reject a certain type of requests, these are microsecond transactions of no (DDOS exception) harm.

I have a script that watches apache or caddy logs for poison link hits and a set of bot user agents, adding IPs to an ipset blacklist, blocking with iptables. I should polish it up for others to try. My list of unique IPs is well over 10k in just a few days.

git repos seem to be real bait for these damn AI scrapers.