Anti-Bot Challenge Page Blocks Scottish Upper Tribunal Case Access
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its Scottish Upper Tribunal decisions page. The system requires JavaScript-based proof-of-work validation to access case documents, designed to deter automated scraping while allowing legitimate users through. The page notes this is a temporary measure while more sophisticated bot detection methods are developed.
What changed
BAILII added Anubis anti-bot protection to its Scottish Upper Tribunal decision pages. The system uses a Hashcash-style proof-of-work scheme that imposes negligible delay on individual users but significantly increases the cost of mass automated scraping. Users must have JavaScript enabled and may need to temporarily disable privacy plugins like JShelter to pass the challenge.
Legal researchers and practitioners accessing Scottish Upper Tribunal decisions through BAILII will need to ensure their browsers support modern JavaScript and adjust privacy extensions as needed. No regulatory compliance obligations are created by this technical measure.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins like JShelter when accessing BAILII Scottish case documents
Archived snapshot
Apr 13, 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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