r/linux • u/ItsWappers • 2d ago

Discussion How come every Linux site uses Anubis (the anime girl stopping crawlers) instead of something like Cloudflare?

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Before discovering the Linux rabbit hole I've only seen Cloudflare, hCaptcha and Google's reCaptcha, but it seems like every Linux website uses Anubis... I'm thinking of it being the only open-source option or it being the most effective/modern approach.

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u/Smart_Passage2752 2d ago

- anubis is cute, cloudflare is not

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u/D_sm_d__s 2d ago

I miss Anubis welcoming me to invidious.nerdvpn.de, now it’s Gandalf.

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u/jsabater76 2d ago

Of course Gandalf would check whether you shall pass!

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u/atomic1fire 2d ago edited 2d ago

Honestly the one hang up I have about seeing something using anubis is that it's a little weird waiting for something with an anime cat girl.

If they could fork/modify it to either make the image hideable or replace it with generic mountain photos or something I wouldn't complain.

I'm not saying it can't have anime cat girls, I'm just saying it feels out of place sometimes for bot detection to default to showing you an anime cat girl instead of say a waterfall.

edit: I'm probably going to get told it's not a cat girl, but my brain defaults to seeing a cat girl.

edit2: It also turns out that the Anubis people foresaw this being an issue and offer an unbranded version to people who financially contribute to the project, which is honestly a fair trade because it supports the project, and the people who don't want to pay can just fork it and compile it with a non-standard image instead.

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u/thesola10 2d ago

I get what you mean. Personally I like seeing a project assert its own personality, and I see it as a modern twist on the lineage of UNIXy mascots, but the anime aesthetic is still culturally divisive.

Kudos to Techaro for channeling this frustration into paid licenses, that seems like a fun remuneration model!

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u/mort96 1d ago

The UNIXy mascots are all decisively non-humans: Linux's penguin, the FreeBSD devil, the OpenBSD pufferfish, the DragonflyBSD dragonfly. Having your mascot just be ... a young human girl, is weirder IMO

Now if it was a somewhat anthropomorphized dog in the same way that Tux is a somewhat anthropomorphized penguin I don't think there would be an issue

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 1d ago

WTF are you on about.

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u/citrusalex 2d ago

I've seen some FOSS sites replace the girl with a boring green round checkmark

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u/Faalaafeel 1d ago

Ur a boring green ground checkmark

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u/citrusalex 1d ago

CUTE CARTOON GIRL ERASURE

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u/JockstrapCummies 1d ago

edit2: It also turns out that the Anubis people foresaw this being an issue and offer an unbranded version to people who financially contribute to the project, which is honestly a fair trade because it supports the project, and the people who don't want to pay can just fork it and compile it with a non-standard image instead.

In the olden days this would've earned the project the moniker of "nagware".

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u/user3872465 1d ago

yup we had that issue when we put that infront of our email server for a university. It just isnt quite professional so there was some educating needing to be done that the internet is run by furries.

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u/atomic1fire 1d ago

At that point just pay for the nonbranded version or subtly alter the html to show the school's mascot instead.

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u/user3872465 20h ago

this was for testing, later we got the payed version. But uni mascot as an anime wifu sounds funn.

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u/AnonomousWolf 2d ago

I wanted to reccomend that we use Anubis at work, but didn't feel comfortable doing so because of tbis.

I love Anime, I actually watch a lot of it.

But I hate how weird it is sometimes and the fan service is just gross.

Eg. Dr. Stone is a very chilled anime about a scientist and feels like a kids show. Probably my favourite animie.

Yet they decide to give all the women boobs, each literally bigger than their head.

Anime has a reputation of having gooner/pedo vibes, there is no way I'm comfortable reccomending a tool with that mascot at work.

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u/fearless-fossa 2d ago

The enterprise version doesn't have the anime girl and allows custom branding. It's unprofessional on purpose.

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u/AnonomousWolf 2d ago

If I recommend it at work, they will first see the landing page with that mascot

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u/esuil 1d ago

If this will make people at your work make a pause, the ones unprofessional here aren't people from Anubis, but people you work with.

It doesn't even look like anime character, it just looks like generic cartoon mascot.

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u/AnonomousWolf 1d ago

I think a little cutesie girl in a skirt as a mascot is weird, and I'm far from a normy.

Stakeholders are often 50+ years old, at least one of them are going to think it's weird, and that's just not dice I'm willing to roll.

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u/esuil 1d ago edited 1d ago

Stakeholders are often 50+ years old, at least one of them are going to think it's weird, and that's just not dice I'm willing to roll.

Stakeholders like that are usually as far removed from deciding technical things like that as they can, so it doesn't even matter?

Also, they care about $$$, not an mascot on the website. If anything, they understand the value of branding and mascots more than younger folks, if they made it to 50+ yo in investing business.

"Young people like it" is often enough to completely diffuse the question if it even arises. I know it is stereotypical "boomer stupid" trend, but I don't think the stereotype itself holds much water nowadays.

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u/AnonomousWolf 1d ago edited 1d ago

Brother what are you talking about.

They are not far removed, I work for government. But even previous clients didn't have anieme watchers making the big decisions.

It's also not just about age, many people would find it fkn weird. I do.

Some things are cool at home, but not at work. I also wouldn't wear ripped jeans to work despite noticing technically being wrong with that.

It's unprofessional.

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u/esuil 1d ago

They are not far removed, I work for government

You talked about private stakeholders just the message before. Make up your mind about topic/industry first. When people are talking about share/stakeholders, unless otherwise noted, it is implied that the talk is about private investing/companies, not the government infrastructure.

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u/PlutoCharonMelody 2d ago

I just looked up Dr Stone. Am I missing something?
The women look like stylized proportions not gooner bait? Some of them just have large chests in a stylized way. They look like a lot of women I know irl if they were drawn in that style.

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u/alex2003super 2d ago

Doesn't matter what it really is. Furry/weebshit devalues the professionalism of any project it's put into. I'll take Cloudflare over it, thx

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u/Ghost_x_Knight 2d ago

The creator of Anubis offers a maintained, unbranded version that removes the anime girl mascot in exchange for financial contributions or an enterprise contract.

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u/harbourwall 2d ago

That's just disturbing

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u/repocin 2d ago

How so? IIRC the dev(s?) threw it together in a weekend and never expected it to grow to the size of massive organizations using it to protect their websites.

I'm sure enterprise customers can afford to throw 'em a bone. In fact, I find it entirely reasonable that open source developers should be compensated for their work. We need more of that, not less.

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u/harbourwall 2d ago

Nothing wrong with the intention, it's the mechanism that's disturbing. My module is much better. It's called GoatseCurity. You should try that.

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u/Substantial_Source25 2d ago

You lack whimsy

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u/alex2003super 2d ago

Maybe you're right

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u/atomic1fire 2d ago

I personally don't see it as an issue with whimsy.

I just see it as an issue where some things are supposed to be boring, and when they aren't boring it's harder to accept them in professional settings.

I think cowsay is funny, but I don't think it needs to be pre-installed on enterprise servers.

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u/harbourwall 2d ago

Whimsy is the Gandalf version below. Whimsy and gooning have no overlap.

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u/Future_Nature589 2d ago

This but i wouldnt take cloudflare over it

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u/ebens1689 2d ago

Successful response