At work I was asked by a different team how we can deal with bots, because someone in my team remembered that I knew how to do it.
I reluctantly suggested Anubis because I got shit for it last time, This is the URL https://anubis.techaro.lol/
This is the 2nd and last time I will ever recommend Anubis anywhere at work to deal with bots because of how unprofessional, un-serious and weird others perceive it.
The mascot being a ~10 year old “cutsie” anime cat girl is weird in a work setting.
I will never put myself in a situation again where I have to explain that it’s not weird to anyone again, same for that URL.
What is a professional looking open-source alternative to Anubis?
Edit: No I can’t just send my colleges here https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper The issue is they find the Mascot and domain weird, they will still run into both.
My Goal: Recommend a Open-Source bot protection tool
The Issue: When I send my coworkers to https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper they find the mascot and URL weird.
Result: They don’t see Anubis as a serious tool and turn away from it
What is a professional looking open-source alternative to Anubis?
I want to remind everyone to keep on topic. Disparaging people for whatever reason is not on topic.
If you see something problematic, please report rather than respond. Your comment in response will be nuked along with the original problem comment.
If you want serious and professional: Pay for it!
If you want it free, you get the anime girl.
This is an exclusive choice.
Isn’t it MIT? Can’t you just… Change the image?
This is brilliant.
The type of folks who avoid Anubis because of the mascot don’t deserve good bot protection anyway. Its like reverse gate keeping, the corpo dorks filter themselves out.
came here to say just that
There is a debranded version you can pay for
Your work environment is bad if they are so easily distracted by branding and can’t deal with ‘unporfessional’ and ‘weird’ things.
Brother I hear you, I do. The problem isn’t the workplace, the problem is that some people will find this unprofessional enough to bitch. Any public facing anything for any company will be heavily scrutinized by a subset of people who actively look for things to bitch about.
The professional, whitewashed and soulless veneer on every professional website is the direct result of hoards of bored idiots with nothing better to do than bitch about any perceived insult, however slight. You either have an organization that absolutely revels in it, or you end up with the same safe corporate bullshit everyone else has.
I think I’ve just never worked in an environment like this it was always either a startup where nobody cares about branding of some tool (also there wouldn’t even be a discussion about it) or places where it wasn’t a priority as long as it worked because menagerial class was limited in numbers so they couldn’t poke where it wasn’t required.
the insane smugness and inability to comprehend that money isnt everything for the creator is astounding “Waaahhh Anubis isn’t gonna get my money cus they chose to look UNPROFESSIONAL” this is why everyone hates corpo guys
edit: I forgot to add the comments elsewhere downright accusing the creator of being a pedo for having an anime furry mascot yeah you guys arent subtle at all
MBAs love getting ripped off.
oh they do want all the shit anubis and other foss projects offers which is why they keep trying to browbeat and bully them whenever they arent soulless slop, see the comment thread elsewhere in this post where a bunch of fucks keep jerking off to their idea of replacing the catgirl with a grey square or something so that muh MaRkEt can get over itself and
take overproperly compensate the projectYou can just do that yourself. Take the logo off.
thats the thing they are explicitly making a brandless soulless alternative you can change the branding for yet there’s still complaints and accusations for how the og software looks
which is what gives me the feeling these aren’t real concerns and is just a way to bully people working for free, if not some sort of astroturf conspiracy by businessmen who want anti-ai tools out of the way
Mojeek.com uses https://altcha.org/
Might be worth a look.
https://codeberg.org/wheresalice/go-away
Even if you didn’t have the issues with branding, this is just generally better than Anubis.2026
mistrusting a firewall because of a changeable anime catgirl when there’s technofascist executing and leading technofascism on IT all abroad
Your teammates are stupid (not to mention they are probably projecting their own fetishes, denialists and negationists are like that) and they deserve to be derided. Changing the logo of a program these days is, like, two lines in a script.
If this is for work you probably should bring in a professional. There are enterprise solutions for this.
This is selfhosted after all
My client wants to ditch US tech and have a Open-Source division, so they are pro self hosting and open source.
It’s government, so they will frown upon that mascot, and won’t choose it as a tool.
if it’s self hosted, just replace the image with your company logo, problem solved.
Look at the anubis challenge algorithm, reimplement it, publish it for the rest of your government organizations.
Not my teams job, we won’t get time or budget for that
If they (budget-givers) won’t let you (plural, team) get budget to alternativise the software, that is an indication that the catgirl is not really an issue. Or, alternatively, that to them the catgirl is worth that much money.
“You can change the logo bruh”
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Hi, tomska’s law is in play and I have been linked this thread. I am the Anubis dev. I am having my agent work on a soulless generic corporate website for BotStopper with one of the most painfully boring layouts imaginable, including a random WebGL effect on the homepage for no reason.
I couldn’t get a .com so I hope the corporate drones you work with will not balk at the sheer horror of a .net domain.
Charge money for a version that literally just takes the mascot out 🤣
@SleepyPie That’s the entire product pitch for BotStopper: Anubis post waifu-ectomy
That’s fine and all, but this version should cost money. Not as much as cloudflare, so corpos go for it, but definitely more than enough to fund you.
If they want free, they can use the anime .lol cat girl. If that’s “too much” for them, then they can pay for the generic .net version.
That’s my opinion, at least.
This is actually a good idea
Just wanted to chime in and say that OP’s experience is exactly how it would go down at my workplace too, despite the deluge of downvotes they’re getting, and I also likely would have looked at alternatives instead of proposing it, for the sake of my professional reputation. I think it’s likely true for a ton of people.
That’s not to say that people aren’t being over-serious if they see the original branding and balk at it, but that’s out of OP’s hands.
.net is perfectly fine, and C-Suites won’t frown at it.
Thanks for this, I really want to integrate your tool,
Plain and boring sounds great, I’d much rather see us using Open-Source tools than just turn to cloudflare or something, these changes would make it possible for me and others to push for this at work.
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai I have made https://botstopper.net/. It is vibecoded as a stylistic choice. Everything in
docs/is copied from the BotStopper repo but with some information that would give attakcers hints deleted.Enjoy the utter lack of whimsy.
As an aside, please DM me somehow. I have feedback to give about your post.
Amazing thank you, this is now something I can champion at work without risking reactions that I’ve gotten in the past.
This is… beautifully without any soul or personality. Its so fitting.
Excellently corporate, I can already hear the MBAs salivating over how blandly cookie-cutter it is.
An AI agent making a frontend for a bot stopping tool in order to appease corporate drones.
It’s robots all the way down!
You are a fucking genius.
This is truly horrible, amazing work.
Nice. And you made sure to mention Anubis, but without it being a clickable link.
Perfect for many of the fun-policing prudes I’ve worked with. (They will never ever actually google a keyword themselves.)
@cadey @Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Normally I’d frown at AI usage/vibecoding, but this is delightful trolling of the OP and I absolutely love it.
How is this trolling me? it’s literally what I was looking for.
Sounds like you need to explain the difference between a serious tool and a serious looking tool. They can frump about it being weird but it is the foss option.
They dismiss it because it’s seems weird.
It’s not a fight worth fighting for me at work. Got to pick your battles
So they dismiss it because of looks, but hey, do tell, do they support technofascism tools because of how they perform?
Yeah that’s fair, it’s not worth throwing your lot in with someone they deem as “weird” and forever be the weird guy if they don’t end up using the tool. Ridiculous that they’re turning down legitimate options because of (fixable) aesthetics
Then what’s the point of this post?
is crowdsec no longer the gold standard? I’ve been sself hosting since … forever and I’ve never heard of anubis, but I’ve seen it in the wild.
Suggesting a self hosted alternative in an enterprise environment is a no-no (unless you’re in a startup)
Any self respecting enterprise level business will require warranty and support which self hosted solutions do not offer. Good luck trying to get an “SLA” out of Anubis support, if it even exists.
Sounds to me like you need a WAF (if you want to self host it for some reason) there are other enterprise level services that specialize in this. Zscaler comes to mind, but there are dozens.
Free plug for my company because they help pay the bills.
https://www.imperva.com/products/web-application-firewall-waf/
I wrote a crowdsec bouncer that outputs an anubis config. They work together well.
Anubis doesn’t try to do any detection or blocking by itself.
A WAF is a completely different thing than Anubis. ~~ And it also has an enterprise version with support. ~~ Edit: misremembered that, there’s a commercial version but IDK about support
Kinda pretty opinionated reply for not knowing what OP is about
Idk my last workplace was full of nerds who appreciated the pedigree of anubus’ creator. We used it to protect our production sites without even changing the branding. If I were in your place I would find it very hard to resist bringing up the amount of furries in tech.
Yea I’m for sure not bringing up flurries at work
I’m sorry your workplace is so lame 😞 most of the IT at my last job were furries, and half of the dev team were trans or gay. I couldn’t imagine working somewhere that rejects valid software just because of its associations. That’s kinda like shooting yourself on the foot.
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What, afraid one of the other techies would uwu back?
