Access Blocked by Bot Verification Challenge
Summary
BAILII Scotland deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification challenge, across its decision feeds to prevent AI companies from mass-scraping its content. The system presents a JavaScript-based challenge page before serving actual case content. The underlying court decision is not accessible via automated access at this time.
“Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam.”
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII Scotland Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 36 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII Scotland's case decision pages now present a proof-of-work bot verification challenge before serving content. The system, called Anubis, is based on Hashcash principles and is designed to impose computational costs on mass scrapers while adding minimal delay for legitimate individual users. No substantive court decision content is currently accessible via automated access.
Legal professionals and researchers seeking Scottish court decisions from BAILII should be aware that automated scraping tools and AI data collectors will be blocked by this challenge. Users must access content manually via a standard browser and may need to disable anti-tracking browser extensions such as JShelter to pass verification.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI 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 placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from GP.
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