Hi

I'm currently just a lurker here, so my opinion may not count as much as those 
who actually contribute, but perhaps other readers have the same questions as I 
do.

- What does 'small' mean? Are we talking about a second of work, minutes, hours?
- Do clients need to install custom software to interact, or is that work done 
via existing protocols?

TIA

Mark Seemann

-----Original Message-----
From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-boun...@haskell.org> On Behalf Of Ben Gamari
Sent: 16. juni 2025 23:04
To: GHC developers <ghc-devs@haskell.org>
Subject: Placing GitLab behind Anubis

Hi all,

As you may know, for the last few years we have used a variety of strategies 
for dealing with the problem of abuse and spam on gitlab.haskell.org. The 
currently-employed and seemingly most effective technique has been to require 
manual approval of new account requests.

This has always been an uneasy compromise. Not only does this approval process 
add considerable friction to the contribution process, the increasing 
prevalence of ill-behaved web crawlers has rendered the approach less and less 
effective at prevent that form of abuse.

For this reason we now exploring alternative approaches. One promising strategy 
employed by other FOSS GitLab deployments (e.g.
gitlab.freedesktop.org) is the Anubis proof-of-work system. Anubis works by 
forcing the client to perform a small (but non-negligible) amount of work 
before requests are serviced. This will mean that GitLab users'
clients will periodically be asked to perform small amounts of work.
While Anubis primarily targets crawlers, it may be that the slight increase in 
per-request cost might also allow us to lift our manual account approval 
requirement.

Ultimately, the only way to find out is to try. If there are no objections, I 
will place Anubis in front of GitLab starting next week.
During this process we will assess the effectiveness of Anubis at prevent both 
spam and over-zealous crawlers. This may require a bit of iterative parameter 
tuning but I am hopeful that the end result might be a more accessible and 
faster GitLab instance for us all.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
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