Anti-Bot Challenge Page Blocking Access
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a Proof-of-Work anti-bot protection mechanism on its Scotland decisions feed. The system is designed to increase operational costs for mass scraping by AI companies while imposing minimal burden on individual legitimate users. The page informs visitors that JavaScript-dependent protections may conflict with browser extensions such as JShelter, and advises disabling such plugins for the affected domain.
What changed
BAILII has added an anti-bot challenge gate to its Scotland Recent Decisions feed. The Anubis Proof-of-Work system, inspired by Hashcash, imposes computational overhead on automated scrapers to deter mass AI data collection while remaining negligible for individual human users. The page is a placeholder pending deployment of more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting techniques.
Legal researchers and compliance professionals accessing Scotland case law through automated tools should expect potential disruptions. Those using JavaScript-blocking browser extensions will need to whitelist the bailii.org domain to complete the challenge and access decisions.
What to do next
- Monitor BAILII Scotland decisions feed for accessibility updates
Archived snapshot
Apr 14, 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 BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
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