Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Bailii.org
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Bailii.org

Email

Summary

BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its website. Users accessing case law documents may encounter a bot verification challenge before proceeding. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to increase the cost of mass web scraping by AI companies. The page instructs users to disable JavaScript-disabling plugins like JShelter to access content.

“Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam.”

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

What changed

BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot protection mechanism. The system presents a verification challenge to visitors before granting access to legal case law documents. This is an infrastructure change by the legal information provider, not a regulatory or compliance requirement.

Website visitors who encounter the verification page may need to enable JavaScript and disable plugins like JShelter that interfere with the proof-of-work computation. There are no compliance obligations imposed on any regulated entity by this technical change.

Archived snapshot

Apr 22, 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!

Loading...

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.

Get daily alerts for BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions

Daily digest delivered to your inbox.

Free. Unsubscribe anytime.

About this page

What is GovPing?

Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission

What's from the agency?

Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.

What's AI-generated?

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.

Last updated

Classification

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

Who this affects

Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Website access control
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy

Get alerts for this source

We'll email you when BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions publishes new changes.

Free. Unsubscribe anytime.

You're subscribed!