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?
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.