Bot Verification Challenge - Access Blocked
Summary
BAILII Scotland has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work bot verification system, to protect its servers from AI scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work requiring computational effort from visitors. Legitimate users with JavaScript-enabled browsers can proceed; those with anti-detection plugins like JShelter may experience access issues.
What changed
BAILII Scotland has added Anubis, a bot verification system using proof-of-work challenges, to protect its server infrastructure from AI scraping companies. The system requires visitors to complete computational challenges that are negligible for individual users but costly at scale for mass scrapers. The system relies on modern JavaScript features and may block users with privacy plugins like JShelter.
This change does not create compliance obligations for legal professionals or regulated entities. Users experiencing access issues should disable JavaScript-blocking extensions for the bailii.org domain. The system is described as a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques are developed to distinguish legitimate users from headless browsers.
Archived snapshot
Apr 17, 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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