Is there a better way to present this software?

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Unwilling user of Anubis here. By which I mean, I have never intentionally used this software, but many sites I use do now, and therefore show me a jarring cartoon mascot for such a short flash it almost feels like a subliminal message.

Could there be a better, i.e. less jarring, way to let the user know what this system is and why it delays their loading of a web page, that the user can globally configure? Maybe y'all could make the default presentation just be a blank screen, and fade into a full web page after a second or two? I do see some links on that same too-short splash screen, but because it's only shown for a fraction of a second, I can't actually read or click them. In fact, I had to search for things like "cartoon web splash screen" to figure out what this project is even called (and for that matter, that it wasn't evidence that someone's server is infected with malware).

I realize this project has a good reason to exist (stopping excessive crawlers), but as someone trying to browse the web, it's very jarring every time I see it, and I'd like to not have to face a jump scare every time I go to gitlab.freedesktop.org for example.

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One idea: this is inherently a political project, right? Forcibly stopping the greedy AI crawlers that DDoS small web hosts seems like a political choice on the host's part. It would be interesting (to me) to make the delay take a few seconds, and explain to the user that OpenAI et al. are the ones to be angry at for the wait. Help build public opinion against the bad actors, instead of trying to be transparent but just being startling instead.

In fact, can I already use this software to do that on my own servers, with some reconfiguration maybe? My interest is piqued.

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I sincerely hope that my messages in this thread weren't being called out as displaying a lack of common courtesy by this recent blog post. I emphasize that I'm not against the mascot in any way though; it's the quarter-second flash of something unexpected that I'm proposing to address somehow, perhaps for instance by a delay to give the user enough time to understand what's going on.

But hey, my particular brand of autism makes people tend to see me as grating, and I have the humility to accept when I've upset someone. Sorry.

[Xe]

To be fair, it's not you. It's the people who have been accusing me of horrible things because I'm not a "normal dude". I've had that draft in my editor for most of the month. I've been suffering from some existential burnout due to life stresses.

Remember the human on the other side of the screen.