Anti-Scraping Bot Verification Page
Summary
BAILII implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system, to protect its Northern Ireland case database from AI scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to increase the cost of mass scraping while remaining negligible for legitimate individual users. The page serves as a placeholder while more sophisticated fingerprinting of headless browsers is developed.
What changed
BAILII deployed a new anti-bot verification system called Anubis that presents a proof-of-work challenge to visitors. The system uses Hashcash-style computation to deter mass AI scraping while adding minimal delay for individual users. Users of JavaScript-blocking browser extensions will need to allow JavaScript on BAILII domains to proceed.
Affected parties: Legal professionals, researchers, and other users of the BAILII Northern Ireland case database should ensure their browser allows JavaScript and disable extensions like JShelter for BAILII domains to avoid verification challenges.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking extensions such as JShelter when accessing BAILII Northern Ireland content
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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