All you have to do is stop putting catgirls on millions of screens where people don’t want catgirls and the entire class of issues you are complaining about stops instantly.
Dislike for your transparent attempts at promoting whatever your ideology is (in public-facing pages in a reverse proxy, of all places) isn’t unreasonable or persecution or open source userbase entitlement. You are free to push furry stuff into the faces of unrelated third parties in unrelated software and we are free to say it’s lame and inappropriate and unnecessary and build better alternatives. You are not being victimized. If the negative feedback from your pushing fetish art to millions of eyeballs in an audience that isn’t yours makes you burn out, imagine what you would feel from the hypothetical feedback to something you built that promotes a more controversial portion of your personal ideology, whatever that may be. FWIW, I fully support the concept of social activism via unrelated avenues that access lots of eyeballs to promote a cause. You wrote the software, you are totally allowed to try to normalize furries via the broad social scope of the UN’s website viewership. I’m simply surprised that you are surprised that people are complaining. Most of the people of the world aren’t furry fetishists, and it’s not simply because they were ignorant of the fact that catgirl art is available on the internet.
Interstitials are super annoying even if properly designed to be efficient and text-only, and I believe them to be totally unnecessary for this specific Gitea-like protection use case with a little bit of WAF smarts. The majority of my technical complaint with Anubis is the how, it’s just the what that elevates it to actively irritating (I use NoScript, naturally).
Also, your tool exists to stop scrapers, and I think the main benefit of the web is programmatic public access; CAPTCHAs are the worst thing to happen to sysops AND users. Scraping is a super important use case, and things like this stop people from politely scraping even a single page of text. That’s very bad and if lots of people deploy this then the web gets Very Bad For Everyone. The idea that a site operator can or should tell you what kind of HTTP client you can use to look at their webpages is offensive to me. (You may recall that Signal and Discord have both tried this shit.)
I’ll post an update in a couple weeks of beta testing. It’s possible my theory is wrong, and that stopping bad bots requires more than heuristics, but I doubt it; their badness makes them stand out and thus easy to discriminate against.