At work I was asked by a different team how we can deal with bots, because someone in my team remembered that I knew how to do it.
I reluctantly suggested Anubis because I got shit for it last time, This is the URL https://anubis.techaro.lol/
This is the 2nd and last time I will ever recommend Anubis anywhere at work to deal with bots because of how unprofessional, un-serious and weird others perceive it.
The mascot being a ~10 year old “cutsie” anime cat girl is weird in a work setting.
I will never put myself in a situation again where I have to explain that it’s not weird to anyone again, same for that URL.
What is a professional looking open-source alternative to Anubis?
Edit: No I can’t just send my colleges here https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper The issue is they find the Mascot and domain weird, they will still run into both.
My Goal: Recommend a Open-Source bot protection tool
The Issue: When I send my coworkers to https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper they find the mascot and URL weird.
Result: They don’t see Anubis as a serious tool and turn away from it
What is a professional looking open-source alternative to Anubis?
The Issue: When I send my coworkers to https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper they find the mascot and URL weird.
You’ve decided without listening to the responses
Botstopper doesn’t have the .lol domain, and doesn’t use the anime cat girl splash
It’s not even expensive
You don’t have to tell your peers it is just a rebadged version of the same website, just say “look I’ve found another one that does the same thing but without the domain and splashscreen probs you complained about”
The mascot is part of the repellent. It will repeal the tech and finance bros.
OP, anubis is not a catgirl. She is a jackalgirl.
Life is too short to be all serious all the time, love Anubis logo!
Duckduckgo searching it, Botstopper, running Anubis in back and by the same author. I assume the website is theirs
If you want serious and professional: Pay for it!
If you want it free, you get the anime girl.
This is an exclusive choice.
Isn’t it MIT? Can’t you just… Change the image?
Yep, or you can pay for the commercial version that has that feature built in. It’s up to you if you want to do the right thing or not.
Yeah but you need to sell that solution to the team before you’ve swapped the image, and that’s not their absolute favourite thing. It only meets 99% of their criteria.
This is brilliant.
The type of folks who avoid Anubis because of the mascot don’t deserve good bot protection anyway. Its like reverse gate keeping, the corpo dorks filter themselves out.
Let’s expand this thought: we should put anime girls everywhere in order to filter corpo dorks. Making something look “silly” is actually a great ideia to shit on those “serious companies”.
Say what you will about having an anime girl wrap on your car, but everyone sees you and gives you plenty of space on the road.
I might mock the method, but I can’t argue with the results.
You seem to have rediscovered why some open source projects use names like GIMP. 🤣
came here to say just that
There is a debranded version you can pay for
the insane smugness and inability to comprehend that money isnt everything for the creator is astounding “Waaahhh Anubis isn’t gonna get my money cus they chose to look UNPROFESSIONAL” this is why everyone hates corpo guys
edit: I forgot to add the comments elsewhere downright accusing the creator of being a pedo for having an anime furry mascot yeah you guys arent subtle at all
MBAs love getting ripped off.
I’ve been explicitly told not to use any open source for a project. I don’t even know what language I’d write it in. We ended up not even quoting for it in the end.
If they pay for something they can hold someone accountable. Not a good excuse, but i don’t know any other reason.
This is it.
It’s about risk management. If you don’t have a vendor to provide measured performance criteria, you have no idea how it will perform.
Businesses are data-centric. Without that data, a product effectively doesn’t exist.
oh they do want all the shit anubis and other foss projects offers which is why they keep trying to browbeat and bully them whenever they arent soulless slop, see the comment thread elsewhere in this post where a bunch of fucks keep jerking off to their idea of replacing the catgirl with a grey square or something so that muh MaRkEt can get over itself and
take overproperly compensate the projectThey want to criticize the mascot and, what, replace it with some kinda glyphic anus logo like all the “professional” companies with stupid silicon valley-approved names? LOL what high-ground amirite? 😂
Irony of ironies: the new logo looks like a glyphic anus.
Looks more like the Aperture logo with a malformed triangle on top. Not sure where you get anus from, maybe a bot’s anus could look like that? xd
You can just do that yourself. Take the logo off.
thats the thing they are explicitly making a brandless soulless alternative you can change the branding for yet there’s still complaints and accusations for how the og software looks
which is what gives me the feeling these aren’t real concerns and is just a way to bully people working for free, if not some sort of astroturf conspiracy by businessmen who want anti-ai tools out of the way
I want to remind everyone to keep on topic. Disparaging people for whatever reason is not on topic.
If you see something problematic, please report rather than respond. Your comment in response will be nuked along with the original problem comment.
Your work environment is bad if they are so easily distracted by branding and can’t deal with ‘unporfessional’ and ‘weird’ things.
Brother I hear you, I do. The problem isn’t the workplace, the problem is that some people will find this unprofessional enough to bitch. Any public facing anything for any company will be heavily scrutinized by a subset of people who actively look for things to bitch about.
The professional, whitewashed and soulless veneer on every professional website is the direct result of hoards of bored idiots with nothing better to do than bitch about any perceived insult, however slight. You either have an organization that absolutely revels in it, or you end up with the same safe corporate bullshit everyone else has.
You forget the legal angle. That’s really what drives this stuff (and marketing).
Exactly.
I think I’ve just never worked in an environment like this it was always either a startup where nobody cares about branding of some tool (also there wouldn’t even be a discussion about it) or places where it wasn’t a priority as long as it worked because menagerial class was limited in numbers so they couldn’t poke where it wasn’t required.
https://codeberg.org/wheresalice/go-away
Even if you didn’t have the issues with branding, this is just generally better than Anubis.2026
mistrusting a firewall because of a changeable anime catgirl when there’s technofascist executing and leading technofascism on IT all abroad
Your teammates are stupid (not to mention they are probably projecting their own fetishes, denialists and negationists are like that) and they deserve to be derided. Changing the logo of a program these days is, like, two lines in a script.
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Hi, tomska’s law is in play and I have been linked this thread. I am the Anubis dev. I am having my agent work on a soulless generic corporate website for BotStopper with one of the most painfully boring layouts imaginable, including a random WebGL effect on the homepage for no reason.
I couldn’t get a .com so I hope the corporate drones you work with will not balk at the sheer horror of a .net domain.
That’s fine and all, but this version should cost money. Not as much as cloudflare, so corpos go for it, but definitely more than enough to fund you.
If they want free, they can use the anime .lol cat girl. If that’s “too much” for them, then they can pay for the generic .net version.
That’s my opinion, at least.
This is actually a good idea
Charge money for a version that literally just takes the mascot out 🤣
@SleepyPie That’s the entire product pitch for BotStopper: Anubis post waifu-ectomy
Just wanted to chime in and say that OP’s experience is exactly how it would go down at my workplace too, despite the deluge of downvotes they’re getting, and I also likely would have looked at alternatives instead of proposing it, for the sake of my professional reputation. I think it’s likely true for a ton of people.
That’s not to say that people aren’t being over-serious if they see the original branding and balk at it, but that’s out of OP’s hands.
.net is perfectly fine, and C-Suites won’t frown at it.
Thanks for this, I really want to integrate your tool,
Plain and boring sounds great, I’d much rather see us using Open-Source tools than just turn to cloudflare or something, these changes would make it possible for me and others to push for this at work.
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai I have made https://botstopper.net/. It is vibecoded as a stylistic choice. Everything in
docs/is copied from the BotStopper repo but with some information that would give attakcers hints deleted.Enjoy the utter lack of whimsy.
As an aside, please DM me somehow. I have feedback to give about your post.
This is… beautifully without any soul or personality. Its so fitting.
An AI agent making a frontend for a bot stopping tool in order to appease corporate drones.
It’s robots all the way down!
This is truly horrible, amazing work.
Excellently corporate, I can already hear the MBAs salivating over how blandly cookie-cutter it is.
Amazing thank you, this is now something I can champion at work without risking reactions that I’ve gotten in the past.
You are a fucking genius.
@cadey @Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Normally I’d frown at AI usage/vibecoding, but this is delightful trolling of the OP and I absolutely love it.
How is this trolling me? it’s literally what I was looking for.
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Yes, your 3,000 comments on here have made it abundantly clear what you’re looking for.
So no, the dev isn’t trolling me.
I think people are right that the solution here isn’t to try a different project.
Instead of being confrontational about it, though, I’d recommend a different aproach.
evelyn: .lol 😜
you: I know! I know. The branding is pretty silly. But this really is the right tool for the task. Unesco and Wikimedia use it. And we can do our own branding for $50/month. 🤷
A lot can be fixed by just acknowledging people. They’re trying to evaluate something they don’t understand, and having a reaction. It’s not even unreasonable. The right thing to do is just acknowledge and move on.
Usually that’s all it takes. Don’t let yourself be embarrassed when you’re being reasonable. If they won’t move on, that’s the point where I start thinking about job applications somewhere else.
This is because you are mature, you came up with the mature response.
My response was basically something along those lines. But it’s still DOA, because that coworker now has to sell it to their team, and they won’t.
Another team asked for your input, and you gave your input. If they don’t want to take your input then what does it matter?
Lost opportunity for the open source community
How? Having bad people badding about your stuff is bad overall.
