Selfhosted

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.

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.

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.

is crowdsec no longer the gold standard? I've been sself hosting since ... forever and I've never heard of anubis, but I've seen it in the wild.

Suggesting a self hosted alternative in an enterprise environment is a no-no (unless you're in a startup)

Any self respecting enterprise level business will require warranty and support which self hosted solutions do not offer. Good luck trying to get an "SLA" out of Anubis support, if it even exists.

Sounds to me like you need a WAF (if you want to self host it for some reason) there are other enterprise level services that specialize in this. Zscaler comes to mind, but there are dozens.

Free plug for my company because they help pay the bills.

https://www.imperva.com/products/web-application-firewall-waf/

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.

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.

Edit: anubis even offers a commercial, unbranded version.

Edit 2: Maybe the confrontation isn't as harsh and the coworker sees a .lol-domain for the first time and is honestly surprised. We don't know history and tone.

A lot of FOSS solutions have funny names, mascots, etc. I'm surprised if IT/tech workers aren't used to it. Just politely tell them, yes, it has slightly silly branding, but look past it and it's software that does what you want.

As others said, the logo thing is solvable, for the domain you can explain that it's cheaper than com or net.

Mojeek.com uses https://altcha.org/

Might be worth a look.