Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocks Case Access
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has implemented an anti-bot verification system called 'Anubis' on its England and Wales High Court case pages. The system uses a Proof-of-Work scheme inspired by Hashcash to add computational cost to mass scraping, protecting server resources from AI company scraping. Users encountering the verification page must disable JavaScript-blocking plugins like JShelter and enable modern JavaScript to proceed.
What changed
BAILII has added an anti-bot verification system to its England and Wales court case pages. The system presents a challenge page that requires users to complete a Proof-of-Work computation before accessing case content. This is designed to make mass automated scraping computationally expensive and costly for AI companies.
Legal professionals and researchers accessing court decisions through BAILII may encounter this verification challenge. Affected parties should disable JavaScript-blocking browser extensions and ensure modern JavaScript is enabled. The system is described as a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting of headless browsers is developed.
What to do next
- Disable JShelter or other JavaScript-blocking plugins when accessing BAILII
- Enable modern JavaScript features to pass the verification challenge
- Wait for page to load after completing the proof-of-work challenge
Archived snapshot
Apr 15, 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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