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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 14th, 2025
Reddthat Community and Support@reddthat.combyAppleStrudel@reddthat.com
11 months

Anubis as possible proof-of-work AI scraping protection

reddthat.com English
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of Al companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone. Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof- of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive. Ultimately, this is a hack whose real purpose is to give a "good enough" placeholder solution so

Hey ticoombs, I just saw this while trapezing around the fediverse. It’s a proof of work challenge via hashing to make AI scrappers bleed resources when trying to crawl our servers.

Could this be a potential measure against DDOS from scrappers when the server load is high? Or even as general protection with a low difficulty setting? What do you think?

GitHub link.

Low difficulty challenge (appears for 1-3 seconds):

Difficulty 5 challenge (appears for 15-35 seconds):

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