It keeps casual users (which most bots masquerade as) out. For frequent users of that site it is a solve once access forever.

Presumably they've configured it to use a higher difficulty challenge due to high rates of scraping on their bugtracker

The point is to deter bots that are scraping thousands to millions of websites in parallel, not user agents.

I think when people are complaining about Captcha they're complaining about yet another "pick 6-20 pictures of traffic lights/school busses/stairs/stop signs/bicycles."

> rather a checkbox than a brief CPU-intensive hashing session.

oh is that why my raspberry pi 5 can't browse websites anymore without freezing for a minute.

Anubis is usually less obtrusive than that, though. This is the longest anubis challenge I've ever had, to the point of being absurd. Hopefully they have a genuine reason for having set the difficulty so high.

Cloudflare doesn’t work most of the time for me. I’ve seen nothing on this site on my iPhone 12 mini.

A zero-interaction screen is better. If I can open it in a new tab and then come back and it's fully loaded, it's good.

I expect the complaints would be fewer if it was a smaller thing, or if everyone had their own version rather than it feeling like one company deciding if you should be able to use a large fraction of the internet.

Cloudflare doesn't even let my browser (qutebrowser) through. Anubis will sometimes sit and ask for ridiculous amounts of work, but at least it's never outright denied access.

Cloudflare checkboxes don't come with pictures of underage girls

Solving one captcha is mildly annoying. Being trapped in an infinite captcha loop will really grind your gears and eat away at your spirit.

Having my CPU go up for a while is nearly frictionless on the other hand. Worst case I'm stuck in a loop and the site isn't loaded when I get back to it, which is better than being stuck in a captcha loop and then not getting to the site.

Of course, not having to do any of that would be even better. I wish the concept of ZeroNet had caught on, where everything is hosted and served peer-to-peer. This gives you basically zero hosting costs and you are immune to DDOS.

The proof-of-work approach is much better privacy-wise than what the usual CAPTCHA services are doing.

My ungrounded speakers have a tendency to pop and make noise when they come out of sleep (sleep? on a speaker? fuck you logitec) and every time these "simple" CAPTCHAs come up, even if I pass without solving their logic puzzles, I hear the speakers activate as the Javascript on the page is figuring out what kind of audio setup I have by playing a silent sound file.

The default Anubis config isn't really a problem for any devices I've tried, but the FFMPEG Anubis setup is quite extreme. I seem to be served the extra-difficult Javascript challenge, as well as a high-difficulty challenge, that takes even powerful computers quite a long time to complete.

Could just be countermeasures to the hug of death every website gets when they get linked on HN, though, but someone would need to set up auto-scaling for that.

proof of work requires my computer do do something and not me

cloudflare requires me to work for them

Well, Anubis actually lets me through eventually and most are very fast. Even this one is minimal compared to Cloudflare, which before I had to block its scripts entirely would just max out one CPU indefinitely (or at least a few hours, I found by accident, with no indication of stopping).

The Cloudflare captcha checkbox fingerprints the crap out of your browser. It's an opaque risk-based thing, which is the worst. Anubis just makes your browser brute force hashes, that's it.

So, about $0.001 of electricity. The nerve!

A typical GPT5 or DeepSeek-R1 AI request uses about 100kJ