Yes but it doesn’t actually do any work or verify anything… crawlers could follow the refresh URL immediately and get right through. And I’m skeptical that not having to actually solve a PoW could make a meaningful difference, especially if the delay from the meta refresh can be easily bypassed.
But on that page, the creator has a comment explaining that the meta refresh challenge does more than just reload the page and wait. They explain that it actually checks if the browser supports modern desktop browser features like gzip encoding, cookies, and more that’s not documented.
Yes but even curl easily passes those tests by default, regardless of the user-agent. I guess I’m just skeptical of how much effect it really has in the real world… you see a lot of people saying “oh yea it works great”, but they don’t tell you what the before and after bot traffic actually was.
Happen to be proven wrong though if anyone has some hard data.
Yes but it doesn’t actually do any work or verify anything… crawlers could follow the refresh URL immediately and get right through. And I’m skeptical that not having to actually solve a PoW could make a meaningful difference, especially if the delay from the meta refresh can be easily bypassed.
This site doesn’t seem to let me link to a specific comment: https://lobste.rs/s/aa7ske/anubis_now_supports_non_js_challenges
But on that page, the creator has a comment explaining that the meta refresh challenge does more than just reload the page and wait. They explain that it actually checks if the browser supports modern desktop browser features like gzip encoding, cookies, and more that’s not documented.
Yes but even curl easily passes those tests by default, regardless of the user-agent. I guess I’m just skeptical of how much effect it really has in the real world… you see a lot of people saying “oh yea it works great”, but they don’t tell you what the before and after bot traffic actually was.
Happen to be proven wrong though if anyone has some hard data.