By bypass I mean "successfully pass the challenge". Yes, I also have to sit through the Anubis interstitial pages, so I promise I know it's not being "bypassed". (I'll update the post to remove future confusion).
Do you disagree that a trivial usage of an off-the-shelf puppeteer scraper[1] has no problem doing the proof-of-work? As I mentioned in this comment [2], AI scrapers are not on some time crunch, they are happy to wait a second or two for the final content to load (there are plenty of normal pages that take longer than the Anubis proof of work does to complete), and also are unfazed by redirects. Again, these are issues you deal with normal everyday scraping. And also, do you disagree with the traffic statics from Cloudflare's site? If we're seeing anything close to that 18% increase then it would not seem to merit user-visible levels of mitigation. Even if it was 180% you wouldn't need to do this. nginx is not constantly on the verge of failing from a double digit "traffic spike".
As I mentioned in my response to the Anubis author here [3], I don't want this to be misinterpreted as a "defense of AI scrapers" or something. Our goals are aligned. The response there goes into detail that my motivation is that a project I am working on will potentially not be possible if I am wrong and this AI scraper phenomenon is as described. I have every incentive in the world to just want to get to the bottom of this. Perhaps you're right, and I still don't understand the purpose of Anubis. I want to! Because currently neither the numbers nor the mitigations seem to line up.
BTW, my same request extends to you, if you have direct experience with this issue, I'd love to jump on a call to wrap my head around this.
My email is my HN username at gmail.com if you want to reach out, I'd greatly appreciate it!
