Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Decision
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system, on its Northern Ireland Court of Appeal decision pages to deter AI scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style computational challenge that adds negligible load for individual users but significantly increases the cost of mass automated access. Users with JavaScript-blocking extensions may need to disable them to pass verification.
What changed
BAILII implemented a bot verification checkpoint on its Northern Ireland Court of Appeal decision pages. The system presents a proof-of-work challenge that legitimate users pass with minimal friction but that makes large-scale automated scraping economically impractical. The page notes this is a temporary solution while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques are developed.
Legal researchers and automated legal information services that scrape BAILII for Northern Ireland decisions will face increased technical barriers. Individual users with standard browsers and JavaScript enabled should experience no significant disruption.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 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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