Comment by boutell

10 days ago

Shut off the broken bot filter so we can read it please

From experience, these bot filters are usually installed because the site would be down entirely without rejecting AI scrapers, so the argument to shut it off to improve usability is rather silly.

They don't need to shut off Anubis, they just need to configure it beyond the defaults. If they turned on the meta-refresh based challenge then all browsers could access it while still keeping most of the bots away. But few people ever configure these things and just accept the broken defaults.

With the current broken default config my browser can't even run the JS challenge due to it using unsupported bleeding edge JS features.

Check out commit 13ce36fef98a3f4e6d8360c24d6b8434cbb8869b from https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git if your web browser doesn't support Javascript. The linked page is just a git viewer for that specific commit.

Took my iPhone 12 Mini a whole of 0.1 seconds to pass it. What hardware/OS are you using?

  • Took about 30 secs for me (5 yr old intel cpu). Looked like there was a progress bar, but it didn't progress. Maybe the difficulty varies depending on IP address?

    • my i5-6200U with firefox/linux is about 10 years old. I used a variety of add blocking and fingerprint blocking techniques. Cloudflare often complains and blocks me.

      This page loaded pretty much instantly (certainly in the time it took to switch to the background tab I loaded in). But then ffmpeg is written by old school engineers with old school ways of working. Their social media accounts are a hilarity of trolling worthy of slashdot in its peak.

    • > Maybe the difficulty varies depending on IP address?

      I'm currently roaming in Finland with a Spanish SIM so would have expected the opposite in that case.