What an ingenious approach for a sustainable OSS project: serve the free version with playful art that you enjoy and that expresses your individuality, but which some people are bound to find triggering/improper; sell a bland lifeless corporate edition to those people.
I guess the main point is branding clash if you're a large company website (most companies care a lot about how their brand is shown, if they care about spacing/padding around their logo they also care about what pictures are shown when joining), hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art. (though resentment could build up if actual humans get frequently unexpectedly rejected as bots by this system, not sure if this actually happens however, didn't ever for me at least)
The approach they took here looks very reasonable from that standpoint indeed.
Branding clash also happens with Cloudflare. It’s only immediately clear when it is set up on a website you already know (e.g., Stack Overflow), but I remember when seeing it first I was visiting a new to me website and genuinely thought that’s what it looks like, and was taken by surprise when something with a completely different colour scheme, logo, typography popped up. I also recall Cloudflare did not (maybe still doesn’t) put up its own name up front on its captcha page, adding to the confusion. In any case, after a couple of times it’s no longer a problem to most people.
The resentment point is a fair one! If that happens and maintainers care about public perception of the mascot, I can imagine them wanting to change it somewhat.
> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art
I’ve known at least one person who genuinely seemed triggered by anime-like visual style.
> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art
Apparently a good chunk of HN is. Anubis-tan seems to me the main reason that this comment section about FFmpeg and Forgejo has devolved into a debate about Anubis; more than the intersitial page itself.
That's too bad, I wonder what's so triggering about it.
OSS projects are mostly done by people on their free time, they can do whatever they want with their mascots/branding/project. And those OSS projects tend to be significantly more respectful of users than the average modern software so on my side I tend to see those kind of harmless personal touches quite positively, sign of software that is made with the user in mind.
I think it's more that Anubis is getting in the way of accessing the content, and blocking actual humans. It quickly becomes "it's that damn anime girl again" and I suspect the mascot only increases the irritation in the same way that cutesy error messages do when you're trying to do serious work.
I fail to what hard choice there is to make. Choices are:
* use it
* don't use it
* use something else
* pay to change the picture
Easy.
> fetishes
And what fetish would that be? That's just a picture of a girl (maybe? Not sure they were ever gendered) holding a magnifying glass, if that's improper I'm not sure what is proper.
