Anubis Anti-Bot Proof-of-Work Page Deployed on Northern Ireland Case Database
Summary
The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its Northern Ireland case database. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work challenges to deter aggressive AI web scraping that causes server downtime. Users with JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter must disable them to access content.
What changed
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system modelled on Hashcash, as a technical measure against aggressive AI scraping of its Northern Ireland case database. The system presents proof-of-work challenges to unidentified clients to make mass scraping computationally expensive, while legitimate users with standard browsers experience minimal impact.
Legal researchers and practitioners accessing BAILII Northern Ireland decisions should ensure JavaScript is enabled and disable plugins that block JavaScript execution, such as JShelter, to avoid being blocked by the verification page. The system is intended as a temporary measure while more sophisticated bot fingerprinting is developed.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter to access 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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