I went to read an FFmpeg issue and got Anubis instead: a proof-of-work challenge, JavaScript required, sitting between me and a page of text. I don’t blame the admins. If aggressive scraping is knocking your forge over, you ship the compromise that keeps it up.
What I take from it as someone who self-hosts: the cost of being a small public server went up, and the fix is now client-side friction everyone pays. Worth knowing before I put anything of mine behind a domain and assume a plain GET will keep working. Also worth remembering when I point an agent at a URL and it comes back with a bot-check page — which is exactly what happened here. Check what you actually fetched.
The story — A request to an FFmpeg issue page returned Anubis, a bot-protection interstitial the site administrator installed to defend against AI companies aggressively scraping websites, which the notice says causes downtime and makes resources inaccessible. Anubis uses a Hashcash-style proof-of-work scheme: negligible per visitor, expensive at scraper scale. The page calls itself a placeholder until headless-browser fingerprinting matures, and requires JavaScript; a no-JS solution is in progress. (Source)