Something that hasn’t been mentioned much in discussions about Anubis is that it has a graded tier system of how sketchy a client is and changing the kind of challenge based on a a weighted priority system.
The default bot policies it comes with has it so squeaky clean regular clients are passed through, then only slightly weighted clients/IPs get the metarefresh, then its when you get to moderate-suspicion level that JavaScript Proof of Work kicks. The bot policy and weight triggers for these levels, challenge action, and duration of clients validity are all configurable.
It seems to me that the sites who heavy hand the proof of work for every client with validity that only last every 5 minutes are the ones who are giving Anubis a bad wrap. The default bot policy settings Anubis comes with dont trigger PoW on the regular Firefox android clients ive tried including hardened ironfox. meanwhile other sites show the finger wag every connection no matter what.
Its understandable why some choose strict policies but they give the impression this is the only way it should be done which Is overkill. I’m glad theres config options to mitigate impact normal user experience.
If crowdsec works for you thats great but also its a corporate product whos premium sub tier starts at 900$/month not exactly a pure self hosted solution.
I’m not a hypernerd, still figuring all this out among the myriad of possible solutions with different complexity and setup times. All the self hosters in my internet circle started adopting anubis so I wanted to try it. Anubis was relatively plug and play with prebuilt packages and great install guide documentation.
Allow me to expand on the problem I was having. It wasnt just that I was getting a knock or two, its that I was getting 40 knocks every few seconds scraping every page and searching for a bunch that didnt exist that would allow exploit points in unsecured production vps systems.
On a computational level the constant network activity of bytes from webpage, zip files and images downloaded from scrapers pollutes traffic. Anubis stops this by trapping them in a landing page that transmits very little information from the server side. By traping the bot in an Anubis page which spams that 40 times on a single open connection before it gives up, it reduces overall network activity/ data transfered which is often billed as a metered thing as well as the logs.
And this isnt all or nothing. You don’t have to pester all your visitors, only those with sketchy clients. Anubis uses a weighted priority which grades how legit a browser client is. Most regular connections get through without triggering, weird connections get various grades of checks by how sketchy they are. Some checks dont require proof of work or JavaScript.
On a psychological level it gives me a bit of relief knowing that the bots are getting properly sinkholed and I’m punishing/wasting the compute of some asshole trying to find exploits my system to expand their botnet. And a bit of pride knowing I did this myself on my own hardware without having to cop out to a corporate product.
Its nice that people of different skill levels and philosophies have options to work with. One tool can often complement another too. Anubis worked for what I wanted, filtering out bots from wasting network bandwith and giving me peace of mind where before I had no protection. All while not being noticeable for most people because I have the ability to configure it to not heckle every client every 5 minutes like some sites want to do.