Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
The current version of Anubis was made as a quick “good enough” solution to an emergency. The article is very enthusiastic about explaining why it shouldn’t work, but completely glosses over the fact that it has worked, at least to an extent where deploying it and maybe inconveniencing some users is preferable to having the entire web server choked out by a flood of indiscriminate scraper requests.
The purpose is to reduce the flood to a manageable level, not to block every single scraper request.
And it was/is for sure the lesser evil compared to what most others did: put the site behind Cloudflare.
I feel people that complain about Anubis have never had their server overheat and shut down on an almost daily basis because of AI scrapers 🤦
I still think captchas are a better solution.
In order to surpass them they have to run AI inference which is also comes with compute costs. But for legitimate users you don’t run unauthorized intensive tasks on their hardware.
They are much worse for accessibility, and also take longer to solve and are more distruptive for the majority of users.
Anubis is worse for privacy. As you have to have JavaScript enabled. And worse for the environment as the cryptographic challenges with PoW are just a waste.
Also reCaptcha types are not really that disturbing most of the time.
As I said, the polite thing you just be giving users the options. Anubis PoW running directly just for entering a website is one of the most rudest piece of software I’ve seen lately. They should be more polite, and just give an option to the user, maybe the user could chose to solve a captcha or run Anubis PoW, or even just having Anubis but after a button the user could click.
I don’t think is good practice to run that type of software just for entering a website. If that tendency were to grow browsers would need to adapt and straight up block that behavior. Like only allow access to some client resources after an user action.
Yeah, I’m just wondering what’s going to follow. I just hope everything isn’t going to need to go behind an authwall.
The developer is working on upgrades and better tools. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/
Is there a reason other than avoiding infrastructure centralization not to put a web server behind cloudflare?
Yes, because Cloudflare routinely blocks entire IP ranges and puts people into endless captcha loops. And it snoops on all traffic and collects a lot of metadata about all your site visitors. And if you let them terminate TLS they will even analyse the passwords that people use to log into the services you run. It’s basically a huge survelliance dragnet and probably a front for the NSA.