posted in Selfhosted

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.

imageimage
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.

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?

Replying to @⁨fdnomad@programming.dev⁩

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 ?

Replying to @⁨Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social⁩

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.”

Replying to @⁨Gladaed@feddit.org⁩

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'.

Replying to an earlier post

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.

Anubis' direct competitor will straight up hold your business hostage and blackmail your company for money when they feel like they can get away with it.

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.

Replying to an earlier post

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).

Replying to @⁨Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨hraegsvelmir@ani.social⁩

@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?