Wordle-spoiling bot taken down by Twitter
By Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business
Twitter has suspended an annoying bot that automatically responded with the next day’s solution when people posted their Wordle scores on the platform.
The account, @wordlinator, would tweet: “Guess what. People don’t care about your mediocre linguistic escapades. To teach you a lesson, tomorrow’s word is…,” then adding the spoiler at the end. Twitter removed the account on Tuesday.
A Twitter spokesperson said the account was “suspended for violating the Twitter rules and the automation rules around sending unsolicited @mentions.” The platform’s terms of service state an account can’t be used to disrupt other peoples’ experiences using Twitter, including sending a high-volume of unsolicited replies.
The bot was able to spoil future puzzles because the answers to Wordle can easily be found in the game’s source code, according to an engineer. Words are assigned to a date and are stored in the player’s browser.
Wordle is essentially a modern version of the old game show “Lingo,” in which players are given six tries to answer the correct five-letter word. Letters that aren’t in the word turn gray, letters that are in the word but in the wrong spot turn yellow and those placed in the right spot turn green.
Thousands of people post their scores every day on Twitter, revealing how many, or how few, tries it took them to solve the puzzle and in what order. That social media popularity has pushed Wordle to blossom in popularity in recent weeks, with people sharing their results on Twitter with green, black and yellow tiles.
The New York Times interviewed the game’s creator, software engineer Josh Wardle, who built the puzzle for his word-game-loving partner. Wardle — yes, even the game’s name is a play on words — eventually took his side project to the public in October after his family played and shared their results via group chat.
“It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day,” he said in the interview. “It doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”
-— CNN Business’ Ramishah Maruf contributed to this report.
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