Bot Protection Challenge Placeholder Page
Summary
BAILII displays an anti-bot challenge page (Anubis) powered by proof-of-work (Hashcash-style mechanism) when it detects potential AI web scraping activity. The page explains that the proof-of-work burden is negligible for individual users but becomes costly at scale for mass scrapers. Anubis is described as a temporary measure pending development of improved headless browser fingerprinting techniques. The protection system requires JavaScript and may conflict with privacy plugins like JShelter.
About this source
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, is the open-access publisher of UK case law. The England and Wales Recent Decisions feed aggregates every newly published judgment from the High Court, Court of Appeal, and specialist divisions: Chancery, Commercial Court, Administrative Court, Family, Patents, Technology and Construction. Around 200 published opinions a month. BAILII is the closest thing to a free Westlaw for UK judgments and the standard citation source for academic and practitioner work that does not have a paid database licence. GovPing tracks each new decision as it appears, with the case name, court, judge, and citation. Watch this if you brief English commercial litigation, follow Chancery and TCC trends, or research UK judgments from outside a paid platform.
What changed
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot protection system that presents a computational challenge to visitors suspected of being automated scrapers. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work designed to impose minimal delay on legitimate users while making large-scale scraping economically unviable. The page explicitly notes that this is a temporary solution—the site plans to transition to headless browser fingerprinting (e.g., font rendering analysis) once that technology matures. Organizations conducting legal research through automated tools should be aware that scraping BAILII now requires either completing the proof-of-work challenge or disabling JavaScript-blocking extensions.
Archived snapshot
Apr 24, 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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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
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