It doesn't detect "real browsers". It simply adds some friction and is niche enough that AI scrapers have not bothered to bypass it yet.

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leros 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah this is one of those things that hurts some real users and AI scrapers have figured out how to bypass. Not worth it IMO.

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mostlysimilar an hour ago | parent [-]

How do you figure it hurts real users? The amount of compute/energy used on the proof of work is pretty minimal. You're using more when you watch a YouTube video or browse a JS-heavy web app.

Of course a sophisticated scraper can "figure out" how to bypass. It isn't trying to be foolproof, it's adding an extra cost to deter massive amounts of bot traffic.

I put it in front of my hobby project because I can't afford to serve hundreds of thousands of bot requests from residential proxies all across the world, and I didn't want to route all of my traffic through a third party company like Cloudflare.

I've been happy with Anubis.

	▲	leros a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		There are false positives. Every time I've used a tool like this, I get reports from my users about it blocking their access. It's especially bad for users who use privacy oriented browsers like Brave or use VPNs. For a personal site where you don't care about 0.1% of your users getting blocked, it's probably fine. For a business, blocking some of your paying customers isn't acceptable.

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axus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is enough visceral hatred for the Anubis branding, I am surprised an AI skill for bypassing it hasn't been broadcast yet.

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randomblock1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Most of the friction is just JS overhead for the computations, a compiled solver is like 1000x faster. If Anubis ever gets popular enough that scrapers care, it would be trivial to defeat. And last I checked you could bypass it by just modifying the user agent