Comment by Aurornis
3 days ago
> This is a usually technical crowd, so I can't help but wonder if many people genuinely don't get it, or if they are just feigning a lack of understanding to be dismissive of Anubis.
This is a confusing comment because it appears you don’t understand the well-written critique in the linked blog post.
> This is like those simple things on submission forms that ask you what 7 + 2 is. Of course everyone knows that a crawler can calculate that! But it takes a human some time and work to tell the crawler HOW.
The key point in the blog post is that it’s the inverse of a CAPTCHA: The proof of work requirement is solved by the computer automatically.
You don’t have to teach a computer how to solve this proof of work because it’s designed for the computer to solve the proof of work.
It makes the crawling process more expensive because it has to actually run scripts on the page (or hardcode a workaround for specific versions) but from a computational perspective that’s actually easier and far more deterministic than trying to have AI solve visual CAPTCHA challenges.
But for actual live users who don't see anything but a transient screen, Anubis is a better experience than all those pesky CAPTCHAs (I am bored of trying to recognize bikes, pedestrian crossings, buses, hydrants).
The question is if this is the sweet spot, and I can't find anyone doing the comparative study (how many annoyed human visitors, how many humans stopped and, obviously, how many bots stopped).
> Anubis is a better experience than all those pesky CAPTCHAs (I am bored of trying to recognize bikes, pedestrian crossings, buses, hydrants).
Most CAPTCHAs are invisible these days, and Anubis is worse than them. Also, CAPTCHAs are not normally deployed just for visiting a site, they are mostly used when you want to submit something.
We are obviously living a different Internet reality, and that's the whole point — we need numbers to really establish baseline truth.
FTR, I am mostly browsing from Serbia using Firefox browser on a Linux or MacOS machine.
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