Anubis, tool to stop “AI” crawler abuse, gains non-JavaScript option

In recent weeks and months, you may have noticed that when accessing some websites, you see a little progress bar and a character, performing some sort of check. You’ve most likely encountered Anubis, a tool to distinguish real human browser users from “AI” content crawlers that are causing real damage and harm. It turns out Anubis is quite effective at what it does, but it did come with a limitation: it required JavaScript to be enabled.

Well, no more.

One of the first issues in Anubis before it was moved to the TecharoHQ org was a request to support challenging browsers without using JavaScript. This is a pretty challenging thing to do without rethinking how Anubis works from a fundamentally low level, and with v1.20.0, Anubis finally has support for running without client-side JavaScript thanks to the Meta Refresh challenge.
↫ Xe Iaso

Before this new non-JS challenge, users who disabled client-side JavaScript or browsers which don’t support JavaScript were straight-up blocked from passing Anubis’ test, meaning they couldn’t access the website Anubis was protecting from “AI” scraper abuse. This is now no longer the case.