Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.
I’m sure you meant to sound more analytical than anything… but this really comes off as arrogant.
You make the claim that Anubis is negligent and come and go, and then admit ton only spending minutes at a time thinking of solutions yourself, which you then just sorta spout. It’s fun to think about solutions to this problem collectively, but can you honestly believe that Anubis is negligent when it’s so clearly working and when the author has been so extremely clear about their own perception of its pitfalls and hasty development (go read their blog, it’s a fun time).
By negligence, I meant that the cost is negligible to the companies running scrapers, not that the solution itself is negligent. I should have said “negligibility” of Anubis, sorry - that was poor clarity on my part.
But I do think that the cost of it is indeed negligible, as the article shows. It doesn’t really matter if the author is biased or not, their analysis of the costs seems reasonable. I would need a counter-argument against that to think they were wrong. Just because they’re biased isn’t enough to discount the quantification they attempted to bring to the debate.
Also, I don’t think there’s any hypocrisy in me saying I’ve only thought about other solutions here and there - I’m not maintaining an anti-scraping library. And there’s already been indications that scrapers are just accepting the cost of Anubis on Codeberg, right? So I’m not trying to say I’m some sort of tech genius who has the right idea here, but from what Codeberg was saying, and from the numbers in this article, it sure looks like Anubis isn’t the right idea. I am indeed only having fun with my suggestions, not making whole libraries out of them and pronouncing them to be solutions. I personally haven’t seen evidence that Anubis is so clearly working? As the author points out, it seems like it’s only working right now because of how new it is, but if scrapers want to go through it, they easily can - which puts us in a sort of virus/antibiotic eternal war of attrition. And if course that is the case with many things in computing as well. So I guess my open wondering are just about if there’s ever any way to develop a countermeasure that the scrapers won’t find “worth it” to force through?
Edit for tone clarity: I’m don’t want to be antagonistic, rude, or hurtful in any way. Just trying to have a discussion and understand this situation. Perhaps I was arrogant, if so I apologize. It was also not my intent, fwiw. Also, thanks for helping me understand why I was getting downvoted. I intended my post to just be constructive spitballing about what I see as the eventual inevitable weakness in Anubis. I think it’s a great project and it’s great that people are getting use out of it even temporarily, and of course the devs deserve lots of respect for making the thing. But as much as I wish I could like it and believe it will solve the problem, I still don’t think it will.