Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Anti-Bot Protection Restricts Access to Scottis...
Routine Notice Added Final

Anti-Bot Protection Restricts Access to Scottish Tribunal Decisions

Favicon for www.bailii.org BAILII Scotland Recent Decisions
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Summary

BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) Scotland has deployed Anubis anti-bot protection on its tribunal decisions portal. The system uses Proof-of-Work technology similar to Hashcash to deter AI web scraping while allowing legitimate users through JavaScript challenges. The protection may cause brief access interruptions for users with security plugins like JShelter.

What changed

BAILII Scotland has implemented Anubis, a Proof-of-Work-based anti-bot protection system, on its tribunal decisions website. The system is designed to combat aggressive AI web scraping by adding computational requirements that are negligible for individual users but expensive at scale. The protection uses JavaScript features that may be disabled by privacy or security plugins.

Affected parties seeking access to Scottish tribunal decisions should ensure JavaScript is enabled and disable any anti-tracking or browser fingerprint-protection extensions on the BAILII domain to successfully complete access challenges.

What to do next

  1. Disable JShelter or similar plugins when accessing tribunal case pages
  2. Wait for Proof-of-Work challenge completion to access case content

Archived snapshot

Apr 13, 2026

GovPing 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.

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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Courts Researchers
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Website access Legal database access Automated scraping
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Judicial Administration
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Cybersecurity Data Privacy

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