Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to England ...
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Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to England and Wales High Court Decision

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Summary

BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its England and Wales case law database. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges to deter AI web scrapers while allowing legitimate users through with minimal friction. Users with JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter may experience access issues.

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

What changed

BAILII has added Anubis anti-bot protection to its case law database. The system presents proof-of-work challenges to visitors to deter mass web scraping by AI companies. Legitimate users with standard browsers should pass through automatically, while those using privacy plugins like JShelter must disable them for the affected domain. The measure is described as a temporary solution pending development of more sophisticated bot detection via font-rendering fingerprinting.

Legal researchers and compliance professionals accessing BAILII for case law should ensure JavaScript is enabled and disable any anti-fingerprinting plugins on the domain to avoid access delays.

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

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Last updated

Classification

Agency
SCL
Instrument
Notice
Branch
Executive
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Researchers
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Website access Anti-scraping protection
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy

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