Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Anti-Bot Verification Page for EWHC Costs Case ...
Routine Notice Added Final

Anti-Bot Verification Page for EWHC Costs Case 2026/813

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Summary

BAILII deployed an anti-bot protection system (Anubis) using proof-of-work (Hashcash-style) to prevent AI scraping of UK court documents. The system blocks access to court case EWHC/Costs/2026/813, requiring users to disable JavaScript-blocking plugins to proceed.

What changed

BAILII implemented Anubis anti-bot protection using a proof-of-work scheme to mitigate AI scraping that causes server downtime. The verification page was presented when attempting to access UK court case EWHC/Costs/2026/813.

Affected parties attempting to access UK court judgments through BAILII will encounter proof-of-work verification. Users with JavaScript-blocking extensions must disable these plugins for the BAILII domain to proceed with access. This is a technical access control measure with no regulatory compliance implications.

What to do next

  1. Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter for BAILII domain

Archived snapshot

Apr 14, 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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Last updated

Classification

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

Who this affects

Applies to
Courts Legal professionals
Industry sector
9211 Government & Public Administration
Activity scope
Court record access Bot protection
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

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

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