These are the kind of reactions I get when I recommend Anubis to deal with bots at work, what alternatives are there?
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.
image
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.
In this case, it’s a different team reaching out to me for advice.
So zero, and they potentially would have used Anubis, but given the URL and mascot, I doubt it.
There is a corporate friendly way to handle this discussion. Here, I’ll even write it for you:
“Hi [Team],
Thanks for reaching out again about this issue.
I have made two previous attempts to provide guidance on this matter, but my recommendation was dismissed without appropriate consideration due to first-impression aesthetics of a product that is provided for free by a small team of dedicated nerds.
I attempted to explain that a corporate-friendly paid version exists but never got that far in our conversation due to your team’s outright dismissal of the product I know to be both effective and appropriate for your use case.
Due to these circumstances, and your team’s apparent priorities, I recommend you pursue an expensive contract with CloudFlare.
If you change your mind and would like to revisit this matter, I’m happy to set up a meeting to present the details.
It is WILD that someone from another team asks for help and replies with “lol” to dismiss your response. You need to correct that behaviour or they will treat you like shit going forward.
They didn’t reply “lol” they replied “.lol?” because of the tld.
I agree it sounds unprofessional though, who would choose that for their domain if its meant to be a legit/serious tool?
See here’s the thing - the mascot and URL are serving their purpose to deter the software author’s outsiders. They don’t want your business, it is a social signal being sent and the reception from your coworker? - did it’s job.
Being assertive IS important in your career. Your colleagues are the unprofessional ones here. I would not tolerate someone sending me “lol” in a professional context and would quickly correct that behaviour.
A factual reply is all thats needed “you asked for a solution, this is the solution. Please do not be dismissive or rude. If you want an alternative please look for yourself, just expect the cost to be significantly higher. Otherwise I’m happy to discuss any concerns which are easily addressed such as branding”.
There is a huge difference between being rude and beibg assertive. They’re clearly being rude. You need to be assertive in response.
I’m going to retract my statement above, but I do believe that anime fetishizes cuteness and creates an unrealistic view of sexuality and creates bad expectations. It blurs lines and I think many people have an unhealthy obsession with it.
I need to convince others to want to use the tool.
Why? They asked for options, you gave them the best one, they dismissed it. Let them pay through the nose for the big corporate system if that’s what they want to do.
You need to direct the conversation away from the logo to the actual product. You are having a technical discussion to fulfill a technical need. When someone brings up the logo you do 1 of 2 things.
Option 1. We will get back to that. ( and just don’t, there will be more questions about other things to make people forget)
Option 2.
A. You tell them is a branding thing and we can change it to our own company logo. Or
B. Mock up the page with your logo to show them.
It sucks but you need to crank into sales mode and suck up to the manglement team who will ultimately approve the expenditure.
You can always contact techaro.lol and ask if they’re willing to setup a secondary domain for you.
Or you can use others endorsements of the product to give it weight.
"The Linux Foundation uses Anubis to protect git.kernel.org and lore.kernel.org and seem very satisfied with the result.
For the low cost of 50USD/Month we get a custom branded version of it.
Well you can pay 50 USD / month to remove the anime jackal girl and apply your own branding. I think its a fair system: hobby & FOSS projects don’t have to mind being cringe and profit-oriented operations that need to look professional can spare some of their profit for this cool service.
Look buddy I understand that URL has the same issue you mention in your post but it is the official Anubis URL.
Thus if you really want to be professional you load up the URL past the anime girl, organize a meeting and share your screen.
Tell them what it is and what it is for.
Explain what is opensource and the fact that this is free only if they accept that anime girl. Otherwise it’ll be 50 bucks and they can put their own ai designed logo instead.
If they are still acting like childs treat them like childs. Recenter the meeting on what it is for. Do a proof of concept. I don’t know, do something instead of stating that the official website is not how you would like it to be ?
The reaction you are describing is not reasonable and large, reputable websites just use Anubis.
Either you are a creep or otherwise come off as creepy due to Audhd things or unwashedness and hence ellicit this reaction or you have a very weird work culture with people being far removed from tech. I presume it is the latter. Hence giving a simple recommendation with condensed information is much more appropriate than just dropping a link and posing a significant challenge to the people in charge.
Being scared of being perceived as creepy may also cause you to be perceived as creepy. A potentially great way to phrase it is stating: “look, here is a great, free and secure tool to do this. They come with a weird anime mascot to encourage commercial customers to pay for their software while being free for private and open source users. It’s just 50 Bucks to remove this so we can just do that. If we don’t feel like paying for this we also could just use Anubis directly, but I feel like we should go with their commercial offering.”
Either you are a creep or otherwise come off as creepy due to Audhd things
That is one hell of a leap. Maybe don't try to diagnose people on the internet?
The reaction you are describing is not reasonable
No, it is. Anubis being unprofessional is by design. It's run by one person, as a hobby, as of last year. When you aren't reliant on profit in order to run a project you are able to adjust your priorities away from 'money at any cost'.
People shouldn't have to jump through that many hoops to recommend something, that's ridiculous
True, but only for a commercial offering.
False, for free or open source software. Makemkv is the absolute best tool for ripping DVDs and bluerays. It requires being compiled from source in order to be used for free. Anubis charges 50/month to change the branding. These both serve the same purpose; a mild speedbump to encourage paying for the work of the developer.
The 'ridiculous hoops to jump through' are there for the developers benefit, and are incredibly mild compared to most every other commercial offering. I just don't see why it matters so much that anubis must change in this way.
That doesn’t really solve the problem. The problem arises when he presents the product. It’s a very unserious and unprofessional image that professionals see immediately when OP shows them the tool, which causes the project not to be taken seriously. Which is fine, because it’s not really a professional product, and isn’t trying to be. OP should probably just stop trying to present it as such. Any company is going to want something more common with funding and technical support anyway. Most likely what just about everyone else uses (Cloudflare).
Alternately, Super Serious humourless douchebags pretending to be All Grown Up and overlooking powerful functionality because they don’t like the picture on the box.
Some people need to get over their obsession with appearance and face.
More like…convince the managers to use the car for free with dick and balls logo or pay for it to have another logo?! If the car does what it should and is better than the alternatives, a good manager would probably pay up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Is it really shooting itself in the foot, though? There are plenty of FOSS projects that companies benefit from and never contribute back to, either monetarily, or in the form of writing code. They provide an easy option to make it look more professional while helping to support the project, and you could always fork it and do what you need to with your fork. The idea that developers should do a thankless job to maintain their software in a way that complies with random corporate policies in order to be more widely adopted strikes me as setting up devs to burn out and crash from having all the joy ground out of their projects for them.
UNESCO, the Wikimedia foundation and other major organizations have already implemented it and gotten onboard, so I would suggest your coworkers are being a bit foolish in completely disregarding it because of a single mascot image that has a clear option to replace. The Dev is just saving themselves aggravation from people that were going to make endless demands of them, but most likely balk at actually supporting the project to enable features that only matter to their organization, but not to the Dev themselves or others.
@hraegsvelmir@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Just making sure I understand... I went to anubis.techaro.lol and I assume the anime girl on that page, that's the "problem"?
Like, the product works okay, presumably, but it has that anime girl as a mascot, and that is a problem for a significant number of people?
Is there another page where she's fisting herself or something?
Literally something that only someone who watches a lot of anime porn would say… Most people don’t instantly make that connection actually. Do your daughters?
Look buddy I understand that URL has the same issue you mention in your post but it is the official Anubis URL.
Thus if you really want to be professional you load up the URL past the anime girl, organize a meeting and share your screen.
Tell them what it is and what it is for.
Explain what is opensource and the fact that this is free only if they accept that anime girl. Otherwise it’ll be 50 bucks and they can put their own ai designed logo instead.
If they are still acting like childs treat them like childs. Recenter the meeting on what it is for. Do a proof of concept. I don’t know, do something instead of stating that the official website is not how you would like it to be ?
Sounds like you work with a bunch of short-sighted, judgemental simpletons who cannot look past initial aesthetics for a product that has nothing to do with aesthetics.
Tbh I would run far the fuck away from that company if they can’t be bothered to sit down for a meeting where you explain that it’s an open-source project run by an extremely small team of nerds and that there is a commercial product available without the branding issues.
Everything you’re describing about your employer/coworkers gives me giant red-flag warnings regarding their decision making process.
Time to start looking for a new employer, or accept that they’re idiots and next time they ask about bots tell them “I’ve tried explaining this already but you dismissed me for silly reasons, so go pay for CloudFlare and stop bothering me”.
I understand you are just looking for an easy open source project that solves your issue, but it seems fairly obvious to me that your real issue here is that you are not willing to push for your teammates to accept that it is a valid service even if branded a bit oddly.
You should go for the $50 professional tier and get your team to accept that as valid by respectfully asserting yourself instead of wetnoodling and trying to get a different project that requires less assertiveness on your part.
I have tried twice to push it, and both times I’ve gotten weird reactions because of the branding.
It’s not worth it for me to do that again, I wish Anubis had a paid version with a different domain and no cutsie anime girl branding. That would make it significantly easier to sell to me colleagues
You say you have tried to convince them twice. How have you tried to pitch it so far? Like, give us a word for word and we may be able to help you workshop it.
I am not jumping thought hoops at work to fight this battle at work.
IMO, Anubis is no longer a tool I will recommend at work until there is a URL I can point people to without that branding, it being paid is not a issue, work will throw thousands of Euro’s at the issue if they have to.
But I will never risk that mascot coming up in a meeting again.
Then don’t recommend it to others. Keep being ashamed of the cute, anime-style picture just because everyone else is embarrassed by it. But that’s not how the world’s problems get solved.
Then let happen what needs to happen. The company does not have a simple and cheap solution for fighting bots.
Maybe it is better they don’t have such protection.
I think the developer might benefit hearing that point of view. A separate website that only lists the paid tier without displaying the anime branding seems beneficial for them. You could suggest it to them.
Anubis is not out to make money, as such it has absolutely no obligation to try to appeal to corpos who would use it without contributing back to it.
Either your coworkers have to get over their hangups (have they not noticed that some of the best software that exists is made by furries?) or you’ll have to re-implement something yourselves.
Anubis is open source. You COULD fork it and modify it for your own purposes.
If your coworkers can’t separate what a piece of software is able to do from how it is branded, that’s their problem.
Xe Xaio is trying to self fund to replace their day job, so i wouldn’t say there’s no money motivation involved.
It was a slightly uphill battle to get my organization to adopt it for similar reasons but we got there with the branding, and we love botstopper. I put some effort into letting them know just how much it’s blocking.
Yeah, but Xe Xaio also has a full time job that is funding things right now. There's room for priorities other than profit, such as cute furry art. Not everything has to be about money.
It is a big problem with a number of opensource projects that could get wider adoption and support, especially from businesses, but seem to, almost deliberately, work against that with their naming and/or branding.
Anubis is a perfect example. In this case the name is ok, and by all means have a cutsey mascot for the basic offering, but if they want businesses to subscribe they need a professional offering. That should be on a separate domain, styled to attract the decision makers in their target market, and that includes having a .com or similar domain name and a more serious logo. Do that, and it becomes a serious contender in the market, rather than a technically good but excessively kooky option.
They’d easily pay 1000$ for a tool like this, and I’d be able to sell it to multiple teams.
But after my experience recommending Anubis at work, I will simply never recommend it again until they offer something like you have mentioned.
I think they have a professional offering. You can give them a bit of your money to have a proper branding as you like, or just remove it. The cost-free version is not primarily meant for commercial use. Just stop thinking a company is non-commercial.
It is simply stupid if the companies prejudge a project in such a way, although there would be an offer for them, which is made especially for commercial projects.
Edit: but I see that there are not very much advantages when a project does it like they do at Anubis.
They do have a professional offering, but it’s offered in a deeply unprofessional way. Selling to businesses means you need both the technical offering, but also the correct commercial offering. That means presenting yourself in a way that attracts the attention of the decision makers in those businesses, and telling them a compelling story of why your product is the best fit to solce their problem. A .lol domain and a cartoon catgirl doesn’t do that.
I’d suggest that, for the cost of an extra domain name, and a boring logo, they could probably significantly increase their subscriber base. There’s nothing stopping them keeping the current mascot on the current site at the same time.
You call it stupid to prejudge a project in such a way, but businesses need a product to buy, not a project.
I’d suggest that, for the cost of an extra domain name, and a boring logo, they could probably significantly increase their subscriber base.
Here’s an idea. Do this with a giant ass logo. Put a banner underneath it with a link saying something like “Add this for FREE to your own business’ website!”
It would have two main benefits. First, it’s still a giant ad for their project. Second, it would shame the company into sponsoring because now everyone can see how cheap they are.
styled to attract the decision makers in their target market
Do that, and it becomes a serious contender in the market
The market who’s responsible for fucking up the internet? The market that constantly attacks websites with crawlers to steal everything for value extraction, which Anubis fights against? The market that couldn’t care less about you unless you provide value to it, and even then won’t give you a penny unless forced (while building the whole internet on your shoulders)? That market?
Most FOSS devs I know who aren’t forced into it couldn’t give less of a fart about “the market” and capitalists with sticks in their rear ends inside it. The monetization was often just attached to a project because it makes sense given we’re all trapped in capitalism and perhaps have to somehow cover project costs (probably less so for Anubis), not because it’s a goal to attract investment.
People who’re appaled by something so simple such as a .lol domain and a cute mascot sound awful to talk to anyway.
It is a big problem with a number of opensource projects that could get wider adoption and support
I tell you how that “support” looks like. Companies who adopted the software will add your maintainer Email to their business contacts. If there are issues with your software they’ll then usually ignore the developer route and directly write emails to you, and if it’s a big problem for them immediately blame you and threaten legal action, blahblahblah. They’ll treat you like someone they have a support contract with and be completely confused when you tell them to open an issue and that you otherwise don’t care. Meanwhile they’ll build an empire using your software and be a persistent nuisance.
Why should anyone not desperately needing money to survive care about this.
just donate to them and you can brand it however you want; but honestly if people think a tool that little makes your site better is silly then they shouldn’t be in it.
either that or just set up your fail2ban and modsec rules yourself in conjuntion with crs ruleset.
Anubis is open source under the MIT license. If the branding is an issue, fork it, change the branding, call it good.
The MIT license makes it, effectively, a whitebox solution. You can change the branding to whatever you want it to be.
If your colleagues are people of a technical inclination they should understand that. If they don’t I would question their competence and literacy. If they’re not technical in nature I would question why any such proposal is reaching their desk without having first been rebranded, implemented in a test environment, thouroughly tested, and then (and only then) being presented as a proof of concept.
Anubis is open source under the MIT license. If the branding is an issue, fork it, change the branding, call it good.
People complained when the Tesseract dev did that. Though that response may have been emotionally charged due to what was also happening with Tesseract.
Your business deserves to suffer the consequences of being stuck in a juvenile mindset. Simple as. I know it’s not helpful, but there’s no helping your business.
I hope Ms Evelyn W. is otherwise contributing more to the company than the costs she helps cause in technology deficit. But somehow I doubt it.
Look, you suggested software that does the job. The issue is not the software, its that your colleagues are being dismissive and disrespectful.
Instead of looking for other alternatives, you need to be more assertive in your job and career. Tell them you offered an option that does the job and if they have better options its on them to offer them. And also tell them you dont appreciate “lol” as a response to a work suggestion.
Scrambling to find an alternative because your work colleagues are too immature or arrogant to get past an animal character really doea not reflect well on you. Instead you can tell them the company can pay a small amount to have their own branding, or they can go with a more expensive option like cloudflare, just because they can’t be bothered to engage with the cheaper option.
But whatever you do, do not accept this dismissive treatment by your colleagues. You’re just setting the standard that they can just laugh at you and insult you. That is the unprofessional behaviour by them, not some projects mascot. Do not tolerate that BS.
You’ve been perfectly williing to argumentative with people here. Apply that attitude to your colleagues who are the real issue.
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.
To some people, anubis is weird, there is no changing that. It does the job, the mascot can be changed by paying, but the project itself is weird to some people. Such person is asking, is there an alternative. You cannot just say “push back that is not weird”.
I mean, you can, but this is a variation on the trope of 'FOSS is ugly" that has prevented popular acceptance for decades. The developers absolutely have the right to make their product look however they want, and the furry-lol aesthetic clearly appeals to some people. OP is pointing out that this aesthetic makes it a hard pass in other communities and there’s a market for anubis simply reskinned with a ‘.com’ domain and geometric icon.
If anubis used a swastika instead of a catgirl, would you be so accepting?
Ridiculous strawman in the last sentence. A pic of a furry anime character is completely innocuous, and the only thing stopping acceptance of the service is intolerance. There really is no need to try to accommodate for the intolerant.
Like others have said, a simple rational response in the line of “yes, it initially shows an inappropriate branding for our purposes, but the nerds who made this like it. This branding does not take away from its suitability as a bot prevention tool, and the branding can be easily changed.”
It's a harmless way to try and get some money from corporations for unbranded versions. A swastika would not be so harmless. What a batshit crazy analogy attempt.
All these comments about the URL being unprofessional or whatever, and I am just now realizing what they mean by that. I saw anubis.techaro.lol and didn’t get what about that was unprofessional. Professional tools can be named after mythological beings, etc. It wasn’t until seeing your comment here that I realized lol may seem unprofessional or something.
Why don’t you just fork it, remove the logo, an set up a domain yourself?
Alternatively, you could set up a presentation that they are a white labeling service, and the reason they use that domain and mascot is to discourage corporations from using the free tier, since the free tier is meant for personal use, and that their reaction is exactly what Anubis aims for unless a corporation is willing to pay for customized service tailored to them.
That ship may have sailed by now depending on how you dealt with the situation, but that would have been the best case scenario. Advocating for something that you know is good, is also good for your career, because now, even if you do recommend something else, your reputation will still be marked by the fact you recommended Anubis and then folded without explaining well why you recommended Anubis despite the mascot. If you still can, I’d bring up the whole thing with the mascot anyway even if you move on to recommend a different service, to save your own reputation for the future, since you seem to be so focused on your perceived career.
Anyway, you can use Cloudflare. Ideologically I oppose it, but it works and is familiar with the non-tech people. There’s also SilentShield, which is based in Europe and in my opinion works better than Cloudflare’s protection in terms of load times.
If you send the link with references of big party users, and under the premise that you can make it look as professionell as you need it to be, and you still get the „lol“s for a lol-TLD: show them the finger and let them drown in their traffic.
They were not interested in your opinion from the get-go.
Edit: anubis even offers a commercial, unbranded version.
Edit 2: Maybe the confrontation isn’t as harsh and the coworker sees a .lol-domain for the first time and is honestly surprised. We don’t know history and tone.
Thanks yea I see there are some reasonable people here in the comments.
Nobody has suggested a solution to my problem, most responses just say that my coworkers need to grow up, or that I need to fight harder at work or some BS.
It has been an upsetting thread to read; in frustrated on your behalf OP. I think many commenters here have not worked in the kind of environment you’re describing, and “get another job” is deeply unhelpful advice.
I’m with you OP. I’m surprised by the lack of rationality in this thread.
Yes, a more professional looking solution would benefit all parties, especially if the developer wants supporters.
First impressions matter. If anything about the first impression is polarizing, potential users and supporters of the project will be lost. Your coworkers’ reactions have proven that the solution could be marketed better. It’s not your job to hard sell your coworkers on furries and .lol domains.
Some comments on here have been ridiculous, someone literally said that I should be fine bringing furriers up at work and got lots of upvotes.
I hope they’re trolling and haven’t completely lost touch with reality.
Something being perfectly fine and acceptable, doesn’t make it okay at work.
Pay for the unbranded version, or set it up and replace the image with whatever you want. It’s open source and is trivial just to replace the image. I see it with different images all the time on other sites. Name and other branding is a little more work to replace, but can be done and that’s what the paid version provides.
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.
Realistically your best option is a CDN with some layer of bot detection and blocking. Cloudflare is of course the most popular choice, https://bunny.net might also work but I haven’t tried their advanced Shield level so not sure how good it is.
Some commercial advanced firewall / WAF might also be an option. Seems most of them has Bot mitigation features, but I haven’t tried their never personally tried anything like that.
There are alternatives like go-away, iocaine, etc.
You could also just send them a PDF or HTML file explaining how Anubis works, and refuse to send the URL or mascot until they are convinced to implement it.
I think a lot of people in this thread have missed the point a little. Money isn't everything, and the branding is absolutely doing its job correctly here.
When advertising, you don't just tailor your branding to the customers, but to the customers you want to have.
If you want to have lots of locals visit your restaurant, you post your ad in the local newspaper. This specifically excludes out of towners, and makes sure that everyone that visits is very likely a local, or someone who actually pays attention to local events.
I think my favorite example was a wedding contractor one of my siblings hired. They used to have a genericly professional "wedding hair" type of name, but then they switched to an innuendo name instead. Before the switch, they got every bridezilla out there. After the switch all of their customers were a shitload more chill about things, with the bonus of usually having very similar styles of humor as the contractor did. She was a lot of fun to be around when everybody was getting ready, and all it took was changing her company name to something "unprofessional" to filter out most all of the bad customers.
If you want to exclude people who hate furries, might be transphobic, or otherwise problematic, you add a furry logo to your hobby project and make it very obvious what it is.
Having your branding and advertising filter out the idiots who hate furries is a feature, not a bug.
Thinking something is unprofessional and less likely to be reliable because it uses memes and shit has nothing to do with hating those things, though.
You can enjoy those things and still not trust your website/business security to software that uses it as it’s public face.
THAT is what’s being missed in this thread.
Like would you give a second glance at choosing something like UwU.jajaja.lol or whatever for your antivirus? It puts out “we don’t take this seriously” vibes and that translates to “you shouldn’t take us seriously either”, which doesn’t mech well with a serious software function.
It’s a tone mismatch. What Might be fine for a shopping list/fitness tracker/rss feed aggregator might not for a finance app or cyber security
Like would you give a second glance at choosing something like UwU.jajaja.lol or whatever for your antivirus? It puts out "we don't take this seriously" vibes and that translates to "you shouldn't take us seriously either", which doesn't mech well with a serious software function.
Yes. Currently my office uses a tool called "keep ass" as the primary password database management tool.
If a company can't look past a cartoon mascot, it is best, for the developer of the tool, that company never actually uses the tool in the first place.
You can stop a lot of assholes at the door by putting a rainbow by the door handle. This is the same, and it's working as intended.
And the P is capitalized, so the software is not presenting itself as keep ass. Would your company use that software if it actually was? With a cartoon butt as the logo, not a key?
And the P is capitalized, so the software is not presenting itself as keep ass.
It's not called KeyPass either though. They did KeePass on purpose, and everybody uses it anyways.
Would your company use that software if it actually was? With a cartoon butt as the logo, not a key?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't live in that world, so I don't know. My previous employer used it too. It's kinda the standard for password management, just like anubis is. (which has a normal name and silly logo, as opposed to keepass which has a silly name and normal logo).
A butt is not the same as an animal person at all. The fact that you compared a cartoon mascot like Anubis' to a cartoon butt says more about you than it does this conversation. Cartoon animal people as mascots is older than the internet by a mile.
You brought up butts. My point with going to an extreme with that is even you can agree there is a line somewhere where something shifts over the line of “too ridiculous to consider for serious purposes”.
You not understanding that, and trying to reframe my argument as equating mascots to butts, says a lot about you. It’s also less of a logo and more on the standard of a generic social media profile picture that I’m no way relates to the product.
No I didn't. You did. It's right above my comment. Don't lie. Everybody can see you mentioning butts first.
My point with going to an extreme with that is even you can agree there is a line somewhere where something shifts over the line of "too ridiculous to consider for serious purposes".
And my point is that "too ridiculous to consider for serious purposes" being the current state of things is wrong and needs to change to allow for less serious things to exist.
There is a conflict here. There are at least three options to resolve it. Either the company needs to change, anubis needs to change, or the users complaining about the other two groups need to change.
I'm arguing that the company is wrong for not changing. I'm also arguing that the user is wrong for complaining about anubis' branding. Hell, I'm even arguing that anubis is right for choosing to skip out on mainstream branding.
My point with going to an extreme with that is even you can agree there is a line somewhere where something shifts over the line of "too ridiculous to consider for serious purposes".
In short, I'm saying that anubis is nowhere near crossing that line.
I use opensource frontend services a lot, and every time I see that anime mascot I cringe and hope that it isn’t saved anywhere on my pc, its like a pdf infestation, a dog whistle. I will never recommend that software to anyone even it proves to be efficient.
Down vote me as much as you like, but I can’t think of anything else other than pdfs, when grown men like and spread moe imagery.
If a random visitor visits your website and they see a weird anime girl drawing talking about security, what is the chance of them just bouncing away afraid that it is a virus or an unsafe website? I’d say it’s definitely higher than 0%.
random visitor visits your website and they see a weird anime girl drawing talking about security, what is the chance of them just bouncing away afraid that it is a virus or an unsafe website?
Let's not pretend that it's the furries fault that everyone discounts their work because of how they present themselves, especially for things they are giving out for free.
Their colleague posted a laughing emoji, I think they are not trying enough. They are also attacking the mascot themselves, which conveys they don’t want to use the tool themselves either and are just looking for validation.
Firstly, sorry you’re having this problem and sorry the responses here have been nearly universally unhelpful and aggressive. This is a pretty perfect case study of what I don’t like about the fediverse. There’s a lot to like about this place but what drives me nuts is the unhinged and reality-divorced types who cannot understand something so simple as normal people thinking things are weird. Half the respondents here think you should scream at your coworkers about this and/or quit. You asked an incredibly reasonable and relatable question and mostly got shat on for it. Just wanted to say that someone sees how ridiculous it is, not everyone here is lost completely in their own (hateful) world. Sorry I don’t have a solution for you.
Getting mad is kinda just what social media does. If you just take a chill pill its a fun problem!
Personally wouldn’t be an issue for me: I’d present anubis to my boss, he’d make fun of both the mascot and me, I’d laugh it off and explain how we can get rid the awoo girl.
I’m fine with being known as a weirdo tho, but in a more cutthroat corporate environment that kind of thing weighs you down carrier-wise so I get it.
I would say it’s what the Internet does. Post a question on stack overflow and you’ll get the meanest responses each one telling you you’re stupider than the last. Same vibes in this thread.
the unhinged and reality-divorced types who cannot understand something so simple as normal people thinking things are weird. Half the respondents here think you should scream at your coworkers
I've recommended the ploopy knob to coworkers before. I was in government work at the time. My current employer uses and recommends software called "keep ass". This is a user problem first, and a software/branding problem a distant second. The comments here reflect that.
Yes, software developers put out things that are counterculture. Yes, that can make working with them more difficult than it might otherwise be.
No, you should not blame the software developer for this.
If the branding causes too many issues, don't use it. The branding is there because the developer wants it there, and wants to have the type of customers that enjoy it, or can at least look past it. Everybody else being filtered out is a good thing.
I was just taking issue with the responses ignoring the context given, and rudely. If I say I can’t use something and why (and that why is other people’s opinions) it’s super unhelpful to angrily tell me why those other people are wrong. It’s irrelevant if they’re wrong or not. I think I could’ve overlooked whether it is relevant or not honestly, but comment after comment saying it, many of them with a shitty tone, is why I commented.
I was just taking issue with the responses ignoring the context given, and rudely.
Yup. The fediverse is usually better than reddit but it looks like today several people got up and chose angry instead of helpful. It happens for sure. I do love how helpful some of these have been though. Lots of good advice among the arguments at least.
@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.
.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.
So your outfit is not going to notice that it says " Built by the creators of Anubis" on the page? They are not going to google research what this solution is and figure out it’s the same unprofessional project you recommended last time? And your guys work government projects?
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.
There is no differentiation around “who” in self-hosting. I would even say it should be encouraged to have companies support open-source tools like Anubis, especially financially.
If you want to start a meta discussion about it go for it, but I won’t remove this discussion just because a business is involved. Especially considering many of us self-host for our own personal businesses as well, it would seem pretty arbitrary to me.
There’s a HUGE difference between the enterprise/government space than small business. I agree the line isnt commercial, but also thems (enterprise/gov) gotta be the ones to support projects.
There are plenty of small businesses that use “enterprise” as well, and have wonderfully descriptive forms like “small to medium enterprise” and my absolute favorite - “micro enterprise”, for organizations with (generally) under 10 people.
Again, I support there being a meta discussion about this so the community can have a consensus, but we aren’t doing that in this thread.
I dont have a solution but I get it. My company ended up using slack over discord because of the same issue. Discord is unprofessional, the brand name and gamer logo were a nonstarter and that ended the discussion without looking at the software features.
Yeah buddy, you probably don’t want discord for legal reasons. Discord gains perpetual copyright to reuse anything you upload to their servers. Best way is self hosted or a service like slack if you don’t want to hassle with servers.
This was like 10 years ago when it was still new, but yea, in the end glad they didn’t go with it. Just mentioned it because I’ve seen the same experience of software options being declined just due to just name and logo and not the actual functionality of the software.
Sounds like you need to explain the difference between a serious tool and a serious looking tool. They can frump about it being weird but it is the foss option.
Yeah that’s fair, it’s not worth throwing your lot in with someone they deem as “weird” and forever be the weird guy if they don’t end up using the tool. Ridiculous that they’re turning down legitimate options because of (fixable) aesthetics
Idk my last workplace was full of nerds who appreciated the pedigree of anubus’ creator. We used it to protect our production sites without even changing the branding. If I were in your place I would find it very hard to resist bringing up the amount of furries in tech.
I’m sorry your workplace is so lame 😞 most of the IT at my last job were furries, and half of the dev team were trans or gay. I couldn’t imagine working somewhere that rejects valid software just because of its associations. That’s kinda like shooting yourself on the foot.
Being trance or gay etc. as perfectly fine to bring up at work, but not furries, especially if you yourself aren’t part of that community. I am not bringing up my kinks at work, or anyone’s for that matter
Look, I’m going to try to make this as clear as I can, because I would like to be charitable and just assume you are just being ignorant and not intentionally bigoted:
If you can understand that being gay or trans isn’t a kink just because there is porn of gay and trans people, I don’t think it should be a stretch for you to understand that furries aren’t a kink just because there is porn of furries. If your mind immediately goes to sex when furries are mentioned, you not only come across like someone who immediately thinks trans and gay people are promoting sex at pride parades, but it also gives the impression that the only exposure you have to furries is through porn.
Please, get your mind out of the gutter. A large number of my furry friends are even asexual - meaning they want nothing to do with kink or sex.
If you don’t want to bring up furries to your coworkers, fine, that’s understandable but sad that they’re like that. But the way you talk about it and your assumptions are showing a lot of ignorance.
You could say the exact same about Shibari.
Also not something to bring up at work.
The issue is coworkers perception, how will the perceive it?
If it’s almost certain they will perceive it badly, don’t bring it up at work.
You should also not get face tattoos if you plan on working certain jobs.
It’s not that any of these things are bad, it’s that the reality is they are perceived badly by others
That’s a nonsensical comparison. Bigoted people often say the same thing about trans and gay people - that the rainbow flag is perceived as a sex thing and that it isn’t appropriate or shouldn’t be brought up because it will be associated with sex
For the spectators, note that OP is the one who called furries a kink, and that I was being very polite, up to and even just after that point by trying to explain in good faith. If you don’t want to be called bigoted, don’t call an entire group of people a “kink”.
I wouldn’t be “stirring shit” if OP wasn’t being anti-furry for no reason.
Unfortunate that you’ve already blocked me apparently, but what I find even more illuminating is that you don’t think calling furries a kink is being a jerk, yet pointing out how doing so is bigoted is?
On second thought, if you’re ok with such a sentiment, good riddance I guess. Anyone else who thinks it’s ok to call furries a kink should block me too.
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.
If they (budget-givers) won’t let you (plural, team) get budget to alternativise the software, that is an indication that the catgirl is not really an issue. Or, alternatively, that to them the catgirl is worth that much money.
is crowdsec no longer the gold standard? I’ve been sself hosting since … forever and I’ve never heard of anubis, but I’ve seen it in the wild.
Suggesting a self hosted alternative in an enterprise environment is a no-no (unless you’re in a startup)
Any self respecting enterprise level business will require warranty and support which self hosted solutions do not offer. Good luck trying to get an “SLA” out of Anubis support, if it even exists.
Sounds to me like you need a WAF (if you want to self host it for some reason) there are other enterprise level services that specialize in this. Zscaler comes to mind, but there are dozens.
Free plug for my company because they help pay the bills.
A WAF is a completely different thing than Anubis. ~~ And it also has an enterprise version with support. ~~ Edit: misremembered that, there’s a commercial version but IDK about support
Kinda pretty opinionated reply for not knowing what OP is about
It sucks that everyone has decided that the nuclear option was the only way, you don’t realize it till you try to setup a HA dashboard on a pi and get stuck loading a website for 5 minutes
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
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 over properly compensate the project
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
They 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? 😂
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.
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.
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 limited in numbers so they couldn’t poke where it wasn’t required.
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”.
I use to go to my old company's owner with Open Source tools and everytime he saw a website that was like web 1.0/Basic WordPress he was like how I am supposed to trust this. I responded that if the dev was actually trying to trick us it would be some React single page site that looks pretty, this guy just wants to make software.
My point is that you are trying to sell this to the wrong people. They expect the average corporate React site with gradients on cards, like what an Ai would make, because that was what their training data was. Anything that does not fit that will be shutdown.
The Anubus girl is pretty good branding because it is an expressive character and not some hollow corporate design. higher ups hate that, they want the simple bland buttehole designs that the Ai company's use.
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.
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”
Are you being sarcarstic? because your first answer has more upvotes than my comment, and the answer seems to concur with my comment (and i quote):
Professionalism = prioritizing getting the job done. These people are incredibly unprofessional.
that is what i dont understand, you are saying the same thing as me so why response in first place and why are you getting more upvotes?
Sorry if i sound very upset but i really dont understand
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.
tell them its professional enough for kernel.org, qemu.org, the freedesktop gitlab server and several other serious software projects.
but I understand it. I just find tye priorities funny.
what kind of company is this? do you believe your work benefits the public? if yes, have a look at gandalf from nerdvpn, but I guess they’ll laugh just the same. if no, you are better off not recommending them effective bot blockers.
I get it that you want to be a worker with a good idea, but after that reaction, I would not give a fuck anymore about what this company needs.
I worked at ‘company’ once that felt bad because it used Blender, not an expensive 3D software, so they bought 3DsMax license only for it to lie down and being unused, but the boss ego was a bit less scratched by using Free stuff. Like those people are fucked up.
This is funny, I can imagine someone in corporate suited up and everything looking at a demo on a meeting room and the mascot on a huge screen. Honestly, I would have looked for a way to customise it or hide it somehow before showing it at work.
