The Document Foundation’s wiki is using Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge system, to protect its server from aggressive web scraping by AI companies. The site says large-scale scraping can cause downtime and make its resources inaccessible to other users. Anubis uses a proof-of-work scheme modeled on Hashcash, which was proposed to reduce email spam. The system is intended to impose negligible additional computing work on individual visitors while making high-volume scraping more expensive. The site describes Anubis as a temporary measure while work continues on identifying headless browsers, including through signals such as font rendering, so that likely legitimate users may avoid proof-of-work challenges. Anubis requires modern JavaScript features. The site says browser extensions such as JShelter can disable required features and instructs visitors to disable JShelter or similar plugins for the domain.

Anubis will implement WebAssembly-based proof of work checks, allowing administrators to utilize a non-SHA256 method for website protection. The check logic will be centralized and shared between the client and server.