At work I was asked by a different team how we can deal with bots, because someone in my team remembered that I knew how to do it.
I reluctantly suggested Anubis because I got shit for it last time, This is the URL https://anubis.techaro.lol/
This is the 2nd and last time I will ever recommend Anubis anywhere at work to deal with bots because of how unprofessional, un-serious and weird others perceive it.
The mascot being a ~10 year old “cutsie” anime cat girl is weird in a work setting.
I will never put myself in a situation again where I have to explain that it’s not weird to anyone again, same for that URL.
What is a professional looking open-source alternative to Anubis?
Edit: No I can’t just send my colleges here https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper The issue is they find the Mascot and domain weird, they will still run into both.
My Goal: Recommend a Open-Source bot protection tool
The Issue: When I send my coworkers to https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper they find the mascot and URL weird.
Result: They don’t see Anubis as a serious tool and turn away from it
What is a professional looking open-source alternative to Anubis?
That doesn’t really solve the problem. The problem arises when he presents the product. It’s a very unserious and unprofessional image that professionals see immediately when OP shows them the tool, which causes the project not to be taken seriously. Which is fine, because it’s not really a professional product, and isn’t trying to be. OP should probably just stop trying to present it as such. Any company is going to want something more common with funding and technical support anyway. Most likely what just about everyone else uses (Cloudflare).
This is quite simply solved by using in your presentation a site that already rebrands Anubis.
Explain the business strategy
Open-Source sadly shooting itself in the foot again because of hills they choose to die on.
Alternately, Super Serious humourless douchebags pretending to be All Grown Up and overlooking powerful functionality because they don’t like the picture on the box.
Some people need to get over their obsession with appearance and face.
The picture on the box matters, its absurd thinking it doesn’t
Reducto absurdum: Would you buy a car with a big dick and balls for a logo, but you can pay extra to have it removed?
I mean, I’d look at the specs first. Because it’s just a logo. Show me the numbers that actually matter.
That said, there are imagery that would give me pause, obviously. I suspect we’d just draw the line in very different places.
If it harms nobody, let people have fun.
I am not the problem, I don’t care about the mascot.
It’s incorporating it at work that is the issue.
Yes you might buy a car with a dick and balls logo for personal use, but would you try to convince your managers to buy it for the company?
More like…convince the managers to use the car for free with dick and balls logo or pay for it to have another logo?! If the car does what it should and is better than the alternatives, a good manager would probably pay up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I might, if the specs were good.
Have you ever seen corporate branded truck nuts? Because I have, and those companies paid to add it in.
Well, only if you assume the end goal is to make profit from the various businesses out there.
Is it really shooting itself in the foot, though? There are plenty of FOSS projects that companies benefit from and never contribute back to, either monetarily, or in the form of writing code. They provide an easy option to make it look more professional while helping to support the project, and you could always fork it and do what you need to with your fork. The idea that developers should do a thankless job to maintain their software in a way that complies with random corporate policies in order to be more widely adopted strikes me as setting up devs to burn out and crash from having all the joy ground out of their projects for them.
UNESCO, the Wikimedia foundation and other major organizations have already implemented it and gotten onboard, so I would suggest your coworkers are being a bit foolish in completely disregarding it because of a single mascot image that has a clear option to replace. The Dev is just saving themselves aggravation from people that were going to make endless demands of them, but most likely balk at actually supporting the project to enable features that only matter to their organization, but not to the Dev themselves or others.
Anubis provides a non-cutesy version. The only one dying on a hill here is you guys refusing to consider it.
finger touch grep awk cat pip, Red Hat…
Unix. GNU.
Dumb jokes and weird branding kinda comes with the package. People have fun.
I think ‘get over it’ is a pretty reasonable take, overall.