Bot Protection Page Encountered During Scraping Attempt
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work bot protection system using a Hashcash-style scheme, to protect its server infrastructure against automated scraping. The system imposes computational overhead on mass scraping attempts while remaining negligible for individual legitimate users. The protection page notes that JavaScript-dependent features may conflict with browser privacy plugins such as JShelter.
“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.”
What changed
This is a technical security mechanism deployed by BAILII rather than a regulatory document. The Anubis proof-of-work system adds computational cost to scraping requests at scale while leaving normal access largely unaffected. Website operators and legal researchers using automated tools to access BAILII should be aware that their requests may be challenged by this protection system, and users of privacy-focused browser extensions may need to configure site-specific exceptions.
Archived snapshot
Apr 21, 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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