These are the kind of reactions I get when I recommend Anubis to deal with bots at work, what alternatives are there?

Submitted ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

https://media.piefed.social/posts/FA/ho/FAhoxInnTfvWEGZ.png

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.

image
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?

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lepinkainen@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Step 1: buy a Professional Domain like antibot-enterprise-pro.com

Step 2: CNAME it to techaro.lol

Step 3: Profit!!

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- user224@lemmy.sdf.org@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Step 2: CNAME it to techaro.lol
  
  Wouldn’t that just resolve to IP of techaro, thus providing a “wrong” TLS certificate?
  
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  - frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yes.
    
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- GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  God forbid they make a living themselves? Lol
  
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justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
but using Cancer emoji… very professional.

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soyslurper2@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
There are alternatives like go-away, iocaine, etc.

You could also just send them a PDF or HTML file explaining how Anubis works, and refuse to send the URL or mascot until they are convinced to implement it.

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- whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  they can pay a little fee to remove the catgirl, it’s pretty clever business plan imho
  
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  - ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Not if the stakeholders don’t take it seriously enough to even consider it an option let alone agreeing to pay for it …
    
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reddeadhead@awful.systems ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If they’re that picky about it just point them to cloudflare and let them solve their own issues.

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diecknet@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That URL has all the same issues I mention in my post
  
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aldhissla@piefed.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Your business deserves to suffer the consequences of being stuck in a juvenile mindset. Simple as. I know it’s not helpful, but there’s no helping your business.

I hope Ms Evelyn W. is otherwise contributing more to the company than the costs she helps cause in technology deficit. But somehow I doubt it.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s not my business, and it’s not even them making the decisions. it’s coworkers
  
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Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It sucks that everyone has decided that the nuclear option was the only way, you don’t realize it till you try to setup a HA dashboard on a pi and get stuck loading a website for 5 minutes

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Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Why don’t you just fork it, remove the logo, an set up a domain yourself?

Alternatively, you could set up a presentation that they are a white labeling service, and the reason they use that domain and mascot is to discourage corporations from using the free tier, since the free tier is meant for personal use, and that their reaction is exactly what Anubis aims for unless a corporation is willing to pay for customized service tailored to them.

That ship may have sailed by now depending on how you dealt with the situation, but that would have been the best case scenario. Advocating for something that you know is good, is also good for your career, because now, even if you do recommend something else, your reputation will still be marked by the fact you recommended Anubis and then folded without explaining well why you recommended Anubis despite the mascot. If you still can, I’d bring up the whole thing with the mascot anyway even if you move on to recommend a different service, to save your own reputation for the future, since you seem to be so focused on your perceived career.

Anyway, you can use Cloudflare. Ideologically I oppose it, but it works and is familiar with the non-tech people. There’s also SilentShield, which is based in Europe and in my opinion works better than Cloudflare’s protection in terms of load times.

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scrchngwsl@feddit.uk ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
So many unhelpful responses here… This is obviously a problem in some professional environments. Same problem with Gimp…

Sorry OP, you’re probably stuck with Cloudflare.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Thanks yea I see there are some reasonable people here in the comments.
  
  Nobody has suggested a solution to my problem, most responses just say that my coworkers need to grow up, or that I need to fight harder at work or some BS.
  
  None of that address the Issue.
  
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  - iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It has been an upsetting thread to read; in frustrated on your behalf OP. I think many commenters here have not worked in the kind of environment you’re describing, and “get another job” is deeply unhelpful advice.
    
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  - cideyav138@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’m with you OP. I’m surprised by the lack of rationality in this thread.
    
    Yes, a more professional looking solution would benefit all parties, especially if the developer wants supporters.
    
    First impressions matter. If anything about the first impression is polarizing, potential users and supporters of the project will be lost. Your coworkers’ reactions have proven that the solution could be marketed better. It’s not your job to hard sell your coworkers on furries and .lol domains.
    
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basiclemmon98@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I understand you are just looking for an easy open source project that solves your issue, but it seems fairly obvious to me that your real issue here is that you are not willing to push for your teammates to accept that it is a valid service even if branded a bit oddly.

You should go for the $50 professional tier and get your team to accept that as valid by respectfully asserting yourself instead of wetnoodling and trying to get a different project that requires less assertiveness on your part.

Good luck with your team.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I have tried twice to push it, and both times I’ve gotten weird reactions because of the branding.
  
  It’s not worth it for me to do that again, I wish Anubis had a paid version with a different domain and no cutsie anime girl branding. That would make it significantly easier to sell to me colleagues
  
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  - unskilled5117@feddit.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I think the developer might benefit hearing that point of view. A separate website that only lists the paid tier without displaying the anime branding seems beneficial for them. You could suggest it to them.
    
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  - lightrain@forum.storstad.net ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    If they cannot stay professional, be the one who stays professional.
    
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  - basiclemmon98@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You say you have tried to convince them twice. How have you tried to bitch it so far? Like, give us a word for word and we may be able to help you workshop it.
    
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SirHaxalot@nord.pub ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Realistically your best option is a CDN with some layer of bot detection and blocking. Cloudflare is of course the most popular choice, https://bunny.net might also work but I haven’t tried their advanced Shield level so not sure how good it is.

Some commercial advanced firewall / WAF might also be an option. Seems most of them has Bot mitigation features, but I haven’t tried their never personally tried anything like that.

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_hovi_@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I agree that if you’re a business you should probably just pay so you can change the image.

I’ve been meaning to set up something like iocaine.madhouse-project.org though, seems interesting.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Paying isn’t the issue, it’s convincing colleagues
  
  When I try to do so they react weirdly and I am just left feeling uncomfortable recommending Anubis because of the reactions I get.
  
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  - diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You have ignored the other suggested project in that comment.
    
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notabot@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It is a big problem with a number of opensource projects that could get wider adoption and support, especially from businesses, but seem to, almost deliberately, work against that with their naming and/or branding.

Anubis is a perfect example. In this case the name is ok, and by all means have a cutsey mascot for the basic offering, but if they want businesses to subscribe they need a professional offering. That should be on a separate domain, styled to attract the decision makers in their target market, and that includes having a .com or similar domain name and a more serious logo. Do that, and it becomes a serious contender in the market, rather than a technically good but excessively kooky option.

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- Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  <rant>
  
  especially from businesses
  
  if they want businesses to subscribe
  
  styled to attract the decision makers in their target market
  
  Do that, and it becomes a serious contender in the market
  
  The market who’s responsible for fucking up the internet? The market that constantly attacks websites with crawlers to steal everything for value extraction, which Anubis fights against? The market that couldn’t care less about you unless you provide value to it, and even then won’t give you a penny unless forced (while building the whole internet on your shoulders)? That market?
  
  Most FOSS devs I know who aren’t forced into it couldn’t give less of a fart about “the market” and capitalists with sticks in their rear ends inside it. The monetization was often just attached to a project because it makes sense given we’re all trapped in capitalism and perhaps have to somehow cover project costs (probably less so for Anubis), not because it’s a goal to attract investment.
  
  People who’re appaled by something so simple such as a .lol domain and a cute mascot sound awful to talk to anyway.
  
  It is a big problem with a number of opensource projects that could get wider adoption and support
  
  I tell you how that “support” looks like. Companies who adopted the software will add your maintainer Email to their business contacts. If there are issues with your software they’ll then usually ignore the developer route and directly write emails to you, and if it’s a big problem for them immediately blame you and threaten legal action, blahblahblah. They’ll treat you like someone they have a support contract with and be completely confused when you tell them to open an issue and that you otherwise don’t care. Meanwhile they’ll build an empire using your software and be a persistent nuisance.
  
  Why should anyone care about this.
  
  </rant>
  
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- lightrain@forum.storstad.net ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think they have a professional offering. You can give them a bit of your money to have a proper branding as you like, vor just remove it.
  
  It is simply stupid if the companies prejudge a project in such a way, although there would be an offer for them, which is made especially for commercial projects.
  
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  - notabot@piefed.social ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    They do have a professional offering, but it’s offered in a deeply unprofessional way. Selling to businesses means you need both the technical offering, but also the correct commercial offering. That means presenting yourself in a way that attracts the attention of the decision makers in those businesses, and telling them a compelling story of why your product is the best fit to solce their problem. A .lol domain and a cartoon catgirl doesn’t do that.
    
    I’d suggest that, for the cost of an extra domain name, and a boring logo, they could probably significantly increase their subscriber base. There’s nothing stopping them keeping the current mascot on the current site at the same time.
    
    You call it stupid to prejudge a project in such a way, but businesses need a product to buy, not a project.
    
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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  100% couldn’t agree more.
  
  They’d easily pay 1000$ for a tool like this, and I’d be able to sell it to multiple teams. But after my experience recommending Anubis at work, I will simply never recommend it again until they offer something like you have mentioned.
  
  It’s so frustrating.
  
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gibandaley@piefed.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Mojeek.com uses https://altcha.org/

Might be worth a look.

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anticurrent@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I use opensource frontend services a lot, and every time I see that anime mascot I cringe and hope that it isn’t saved anywhere on my pc, its like a pdf infestation, a dog whistle. I will never recommend that software to anyone even it proves to be efficient.

Down vote me as much as you like, but I can’t think of anything else other than pdfs, when grown men like and spread moe imagery.

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- wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Associating a furry animie character as pedofilia says WAY more about your search history than anything that image is.
  
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- warm@kbin.earth ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Wow youre so alpha
  
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  - anticurrent@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    What does this even mean ? Peter explain the joke !
    
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- whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Okay so you’re talking about Paedophiles or Pedophile, and not Portable Document Format(PDF), I guess?
  
  Took me time to convert pedophiles into PDF, must be in the last version of adobe reader
  
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  - droans@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I thought he just really hated PDFs and honestly I was just nodding along.
    
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  - anticurrent@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    yes it is!
    
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cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
just donate to them and you can brand it however you want; but honestly if people think a tool that little makes your site better is silly then they shouldn’t be in it.

either that or just set up your fail2ban and modsec rules yourself in conjuntion with crs ruleset.

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Crescent@fedinsfw.app ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
You immediately trying to put an age on the mascot is totally not weird, either.

Why would anyone care what the domain name or the mascot for a tool is, if it does the job?

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- alphabethunter@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  If a random visitor visits your website and they see a weird anime girl drawing talking about security, what is the chance of them just bouncing away afraid that it is a virus or an unsafe website? I’d say it’s definitely higher than 0%.
  
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  - DaGeek247@fedia.io ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    random visitor visits your website and they see a weird anime girl drawing talking about security, what is the chance of them just bouncing away afraid that it is a virus or an unsafe website?
    
    Very high. And they'd be completely wrong in doing so.
    
    Let's not pretend that it's the furries fault that everyone discounts their work because of how they present themselves, especially for things they are giving out for free.
    
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- TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  OP is relaying an opinion they got from multiple people and frankly an expected one. You got weirdly mad at them for it.
  
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  - Crescent@fedinsfw.app ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Their colleague posted a laughing emoji, I think they are not trying enough. They are also attacking the mascot themselves, which conveys they don’t want to use the tool themselves either and are just looking for validation.
    
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diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Doing bad decisions are part of simple sabotage, comrade.

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irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Pay for the unbranded version, or set it up and replace the image with whatever you want. It’s open source and is trivial just to replace the image. I see it with different images all the time on other sites. Name and other branding is a little more work to replace, but can be done and that’s what the paid version provides.

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amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Is this something I can deploy on my homeland for my web facing services? Or am I miss understanding the purpose

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- tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yes, your reverse proxy serves this and only then the actual service when the client solved it
  
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  - amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    So it is like a captcha?
    
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SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
As others said, the logo thing is solvable, for the domain you can explain that it's cheaper than com or net.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  What URL do I send my coworkers/management to where they don’t run into that logo?
  
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  - DaGeek247@fedia.io ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That's the neat part. You don't. If they can't get past the branding, that's their problem.
    
    Trying to force the issue makes it into anubis' problem, which is a dick move for free software.
    
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  - SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I meant the "monthly paid no-logo version" route, but I see you solved the problem talking directly with the dev, nice.
    
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SrMono@feddit.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If you send the link with references of big party users, and under the premise that you can make it look as professionell as you need it to be, and you still get the „lol“s for a lol-TLD: show them the finger and let them drown in their traffic.

They were not interested in your opinion from the get-go.

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unitedwithme@lemmy.today ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
A shitload of comments and nobody suggests Alt captcha?

Is this more or less what you’re looking for? MIT license, privacy-first anti-bot. Says free, self hostable, open source, too.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Thank you, now this is what I was looking for
  
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Arda@piefed.social ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’d so funny man lol i love the mascots tbh

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starlily@mastodon.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai
I feel all of this.
It's fucking wild how people defend unprofessional appearances, and insist a product is presentable to C level types.
FOSS authors can do whatever they want of course, but adding visible edgyness or uwu is the surest way to limit or kill a product.
Just ask the gimp folks.
I was the dev on a project named Pimp. I hated the name, but the edgelords who ran it thought it was hilarious. Of course no pros would use it, and it's dead now.
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- starlily@mastodon.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  @Ek-Hou-Van-Braai
  Also: stop responding to no pfp accounts with single digit post counts. These are obviously socks and trolls.
  Some Anubis fan girl has targeted this thread with more than a dozen of these accounts from about 4 instances, betting on your honest nature to respond to them all. Sorry, the fedi is full of jerkoffs too.
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Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Anubis is pretty weird, I can see why.

I think cloudflare is an alternative

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kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
have seen this one on the invidious instance i use gandalf.nerdvpn.de

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DupaCycki@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
[deleted]
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- CoffeeGhost@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You can get your point across without saying a slur you know
  
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northertech@fedia.io ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I use to go to my old company's owner with Open Source tools and everytime he saw a website that was like web 1.0/Basic WordPress he was like how I am supposed to trust this. I responded that if the dev was actually trying to trick us it would be some React single page site that looks pretty, this guy just wants to make software.

My point is that you are trying to sell this to the wrong people. They expect the average corporate React site with gradients on cards, like what an Ai would make, because that was what their training data was. Anything that does not fit that will be shutdown.

The Anubus girl is pretty good branding because it is an expressive character and not some hollow corporate design. higher ups hate that, they want the simple bland buttehole designs that the Ai company's use.

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greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I bet the business saying that Anubis looks unprofessional is itself deeply unprofessional.

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- Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s not even the business, it’s colleagues, and yes you are correct.
  
  But at the end of the day, I am just left feeling uncomfortable recommending Anubis because of the reactions I get.
  
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  - greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Your colleges need to grow up and pay the $50/mo.
    
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