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If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s similar to how bitcoin mining works. Anubis is not literally mining cryptocurrency, but it is similar in concept to other projects that do exactly that
Did the author only now discover cryptography? It's like a cryptocurrency, just without currency, what a concept!
It's a perfectly valid way to explain it, though
If you try to show up with "cryptography" as an explanation, people will think of encrypting messages, not proof of work
"Cryptocurrency with the currency" really is the perfect single sentence explanation
It's quite similar.
because anime catgirls are the best
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 🤦
Out of curiosity, what’s the issue with Cloudflair? Aside from the constant worry they may strong arm you into their enterprise pricing if you’re site is too popular lol. I understand support open source, but why not let companies handle the expensive bits as long as they’re willing?
I guess I can answer my own question. If the point of the Fediverse is to remove a single point of failure, then I suppose Cloidflare could become a single point to take down the network. Still, we could always pivot away from those types of services later, right?
Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They've switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it's easy, some years it's impossible.
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/
I'll say the developer is also very responsive. They're (ambiguous 'they', not sure of pronouns) active in a libraries-fighting-bots slack channel I'm on. Libraries have been hit hard by the bots: we have hoards of tasty archives and we don't have money to throw resources at the problem.
The problem is that the purpose of Anubis was to make crawling more computationally expensive and that crawlers are apparently increasingly prepared to accept that additional cost. One option would be to pile some required cycles on top of what's currently asked, but it's a balancing act before it starts to really be an annoyance for the meat popsicle users.
That's why the developer is working on a better detection mechanism. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/avoiding-becoming-peg-dependency/
The article is very enthusiastic about explaining why it shouldn't work, but completely glosses over the fact that it has worked
This post was originally written for ycombinator "Hacker" News which is vehemently against people hacking things together for greater good, and more importantly for free.
It's more of a corporate PR release site and if you aren't known by the "community", calling out solutions they can't profit off of brings all the tech-bros to the yard for engagement.
This… makes no sense to me. Almost by definition, an AI vendor will have a datacenter full of compute capacity.
Well it doesnt fucking matter what "makes sense to you" because it is working...
Its being deployed by people who had their sites DDoS'd to shit by crawlers and they are very happy with the results so what even is the point of trying to argue here?
It's working because it's not very used. It's sort of a "pirate seagull" theory. As long a few people use it it works. Because scrappers don't really count on Anubis so they don't implement systems to surpass it.
If it were to become more common it would be really easy to implement systems that would defeat the purpose.
As of right now sites are ok because scrappers just send https requests and expect a full response. If someone wants to bypass Anubis protection they would need to take into account that they will receive a cryptographic challenge and have to solve it.
The thing is that cryptographic challenges can be very optimized. They are designed to run in a very inefficient environment as it is a browser. But if someone would take the challenge and solve it in a better environment using CUDA or something like that it would take a fraction of the energy defeating the purpose of "being so costly that it's not worth scrapping".
At this point it's only a matter of time that we start seeing scrappers like that. Specially if more and more sites start using Anubis.
New developments: just a few hours before I post this comment, The Register posted an article about AI crawler traffic. https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/ai_crawler_traffic/
Anubis' developer was interviewed and they posted the responses on their website: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/el-reg-responses/
In particular:
Fastly's claims that 80% of bot traffic is now AI crawlers
In some cases for open source projects, we've seen upwards of 95% of traffic being AI crawlers. For one, deploying Anubis almost instantly caused server load to crater by so much that it made them think they accidentally took their site offline. One of my customers had their power bills drop by a significant fraction after deploying Anubis. It's nuts.
So, yeah. If we believe Xe, OOP's article is complete hogwash.
Anubis is no challenge like a captcha. Anubis is a ressource waster, forcing crawler to resolve a crypto challenge (basically like mining bitcoin) before being allowed in. That how it defends so well against bots, as they do not want to waste their resources on needless computing, they just cancel the page loading before it even happen, and go crawl elsewhere.
Anubis sucks
However, the number of viable options is limited.
Yeah but at least Anubis is cute.
I'll take sucks but cute over dead internet and endless swarmings of zergling crawlers.
Have you tried accessing it by using Nyarch?
There are some sites where Anubis won't let me through. Like, I just get immediately bounced.
So RIP dwarf fortress forums. I liked you.
I don't get it, I thought it allows all browser with JavaScript enabled.