PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking

AI scrapers have been hammering fediverse servers for years with things getting especially intense lately. Fediverse developers have been slow to respond with solutions so desperate instance admins have been bolting on Anubis which is fragile and really hard to configure in a way that doesn't break federation, mobile clients or web UI access. Anubis forces browsers to run some CPU-heavy javascript for a few seconds, increasing the cost to scrapers hopefully to the point where they go elsewhere instead.

PieFed now includes that functionality as a core feature, not a separate container, proxy or process that needs to be set up. Just set the ANOOBIS environment variable and you're done. Yes, that spelling is intentional.

The amount of work a client needs to do can be tuned with the ANOOBIS_DIFFICULTY_DESKTOP and ANOOBIS_DIFFICULTY_MOBILE environment variables - the defaults are quite weak.

Early results are very promising and a 50% CPU and network reduction on the server is commonly seen. Clients that are not logged in will see a brief loading screen, once every 1000 days, before being taken to the post they were trying to view.

I'm sure this isn't the end of this war but I've been enjoying a respite from it for the last week, long may it continue.