alt Hacker NewsHow do you figure it hurts real users? The amount of compute/energy used on the proof of work is pretty minimal. You're using more when you watch a YouTube video or browse a JS-heavy web app.
Of course a sophisticated scraper can "figure out" how to bypass. It isn't trying to be foolproof, it's adding an extra cost to deter massive amounts of bot traffic.
I put it in front of my hobby project because I can't afford to serve hundreds of thousands of bot requests from residential proxies all across the world, and I didn't want to route all of my traffic through a third party company like Cloudflare.
I've been happy with Anubis.
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There are false positives. Every time I've used a tool like this, I get reports from my users about it blocking their access. It's especially bad for users who use privacy oriented browsers like Brave or use VPNs.
For a personal site where you don't care about 0.1% of your users getting blocked, it's probably fine. For a business, blocking some of your paying customers isn't acceptable.
1. It makes the web more annoying and time wasting.
2. I'm a real user and I have to enable JavaScript and run arbitrary programs from untrusted websites to access them. One browser that I use doesn't even support JavaScript (w3m). Fortunately it is unaffected because it doesn't have the string "Mozilla" in its UA and Anubis lets every user without that pass to not hurt legitimate bots like search engine crawlers. As said Anubis is trivially bypassed. The only reason it isn't bypassed is because it's simply too irrelevant to the AI companies.