I looked this up and realised it’s the page I’d seen briefly on a range of websites lately. It’s not annoyed me at all. Not nearly as much as having to complete captchas with slow refreshing tiles.

> just crank it up when you get a flood,

A few months ago there was a story posted here about someone who completely eliminated crawlers on their website with Anubis.

I think it was getting upvoted before users were clicking the article because if you did, you had to leave the Anubis PoW page open for several minutes before you could get into the site. The Anubis difficulty scale is unintuitive and the difference between a small delay and becoming unusable is easy to cross.

For me Cloudflare is worse, it takes more than 5 seconds, where as anubius take 1-2 secs.

funny with all the IP information they have, cloudflare cannot do a better job. (I am on IPv6)

and most of the time, its on marketing product pages like in framework main site, which can be cached.

From my understanding this is also how cloudflare bot protection has worked for a long time, and then they look for entropy in user input to confirm the user is human. Also how recaptcha without images works.

Except when it throws you into a reload loop. It's pretty buggy, and trivial to bypass.

And contrary to grandparent, PoW only worked because it was a novel thing to work around, a simple "type human" prompt would've worked as well.

When anubis gets widespread enough users will still run the PoW in javascript or whatever while the scrapers will run much more optimized native code, so no, it doesn't scale.