Anti-Bot Verification Page Notice
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot verification system to protect server resources against aggressive AI web scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges that add negligible load for individual users but become resource-prohibitive at mass scraping scale. The verification page is a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques for headless browsers are developed.
What changed
BAILII has added an anti-bot verification layer to its Northern Ireland legal database. The Anubis system implements proof-of-work challenges that legitimate users solve transparently while impeding automated scrapers. The document clarifies that this is a compromise solution while more advanced bot detection methods are developed.
Affected parties accessing BAILII databases should be aware that modern JavaScript is required and anti-tracking plugins may need to be disabled. There are no compliance deadlines or regulatory obligations imposed by this informational page about website access technology.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter for the bailii.org domain to access 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.
Related changes
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