[bscphil]

It's even worse if you block cookies outright. Every time I hit a new Anubis site I scream in my head because it just spins endlessly and stupidly until you enable cookies, without even a warning. Absolutely terrible user experience; I wouldn't put any version of this in front of a corporate / professional site.

[Dylan16807]

Blocking cookies completely is just asking for a worse method of tracking sessions. It's fine for a site to be aware of visits. As someone who argues that sites should work without javascript, blocking all cookies strikes me as doing things wrong.

[bscphil]

A huge proportion of sites (a) use cookies, (b) don't need cookies. You can easily use extensions to enable cookies for the sites that need them, while leaving others disabled. Obviously some sites are going to do shitty things to track you, but they'd probably be doing that anyway.

The issue I'm talking about is specifically how frustrating it is to hit yet another site that has switched to Anubis recently and having to enable cookies for it.

[xena]

Hi. Developer of Anubis here. How am I meant to store state in the client without cookies if JavaScript is also disabled? Genuinely curious.

[bscphil]

The issue isn't primarily about JS being disabled, because at least if you have it disabled, it's (a) obvious you're hitting an Anubis page, (b) you don't endlessly refresh the page over and over every 0.25 seconds until you fix it.

What you ought to do is warn the user. It's easy enough to detect server-side if cookies are disabled, because if you set one it ought to be sent on any subsequent requests. If requests after the initial site hit don't have the cookie, it clearly failed to set and/or send, so instead of refreshing the page over and over you should display an error.

This isn't a problem exclusively with Anubis, there are some other sites that will endlessly refresh if you don't have cookies enabled, but it's really poor practice to not handle error conditions in your application.

[Dylan16807]

The next best alternative to a basic session cookie isn't doing shitty things, it's either using your IP and praying that doesn't break, or putting the session token into each link.

There's no real way to hide that you're visiting the site and clicking multiple pages during that visit, so I don't see what's so bad about accepting a first party cookie for an hour.

[GoblinSlayer]

You would prefer the cookie embedded in url?

[bscphil]

I would prefer web developers not track me at all without a good reason and consent. Yes, I also block JS on a per-site basis, use an ad / tracking blocker, and block all third party cookies entirely.

I'm not naive - I know that it is possible to track me using other server-side tools even with all this effort, but on the other hand I'm easily in the 0.1% most difficult users to track, which means a lot of web devs are going to use the easy approaches that work for 99% of users and leave me alone. That's a worthwhile trade to make, for me.

[GoblinSlayer]

FWIW with these systems you can proactively ask a new challenge as often as you want or even use many tokens simultaneously.

[goku12]

I will take Anubis any day over its alternative - the cloudflare verification page. I just close the tab as soon as I see it.

[Spivak]

Browsers that have cookies and/or JS disabled have been getting broken experiences for well over a decade, it's hard to take this criticism seriously when professional sites are the most likely to break in this situation.

[jezek2]

If you want to browse the web without cookies (and without JS in an usable manner) you may try FixProxy[1]. It has a direct support for Anubis in the development version.

[1]: https://www.fixbrowser.org/blog/fixproxy