Thanks to a particularly annoying botnet, everyone's favorite anime cat girl firewall is now helping protect piefed.ca & lemmy.ca from bots and scrapers.
This is requests per second and these are all thousands of scrapers on residential IPs hammering us:
They'd increase their usage until the site started struggling, then move on. I banned their user agents, but have no interest in a cat & mouse game. Anubis should hopefully keep things running much smoother for everyone.
Let me know if you have any trouble!
To my knowledge, which is often wrong, that's necessary.
It's a proof of work system, so your browser has to receive the challenge work, create background workers to do it, then submit the results and get authenticated.
If the work wasn't challenging (slow), then it wouldn't be any impediment to scrapers and bots.
Whether there are alternatives to proof of work that work well, I do not know. But fingerprinting alone is actually very difficult.