Bot Protection Page Blocking Access to Case
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a bot protection system using Proof-of-Work (Hashcash-style), to protect its servers against AI web scraping. The protection page explains the system requires JavaScript and may conflict with privacy plugins like JShelter. Users must complete the proof-of-work challenge to access case content.
What changed
BAILII implemented an Anubis bot protection system using Proof-of-Work (Hashcash) to deter aggressive AI web scraping that causes server downtime. The system adds computational load for bots while remaining negligible for individual legitimate users.
Users accessing case content must disable privacy plugins like JShelter and enable JavaScript. This affects legal researchers, AI developers scraping case law, and general users who may experience access delays when browsing BAILII databases.
What to do next
- Disable JShelter or similar plugins for the BAILII domain
- Enable modern JavaScript to access case 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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