Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Block - Case Content Unavailable
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Block - Case Content Unavailable

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Summary

BAILII's Anubis anti-bot protection system activated, presenting a proof-of-work verification challenge instead of case content. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to increase the cost of mass web scraping by AI companies. The page instructs users to enable JavaScript and disable JShelter or similar browser extensions to proceed.

Published by BAILII on bailii.org . Detected, standardized, and enriched by GovPing. Review our methodology and editorial standards .

What changed

BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot protection, on its case database. The system presents a computational challenge to visitors identified as potential scrapers, adding negligible load for individual users but significant cost at scale. This is an infrastructure measure to protect server resources rather than a regulatory action.

Legal researchers and compliance professionals accessing BAILII for case law should note that automated or headless browser access may trigger this verification. Disabling JavaScript-blocking extensions and enabling standard browser JavaScript is required to proceed to case content.

Archived snapshot

Apr 21, 2026

GovPing 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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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Branch
Judicial
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Researchers Technology companies
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Legal database access Bot protection systems
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Judicial Administration
Operational domain
IT Security
Compliance frameworks
NIST CSF
Topics
Cybersecurity Data Privacy

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