No-one likes a spoilsport! Twitter BANS a bot account that leaked the ‘Wordle’ answer to millions of eager players
- Twitter account ‘The Wordlinator’ was posting Wordle answers a day in advance
- Twitter has removed the spoilsport account for ‘sending unsolicited @mentions’
- British software engineer Josh Wardle invented the game Wordle for his partner
Twitter has suspended a bot account that was spoiling the solution to the next day’s Wordle, the wildly popular online word puzzle.
Wordle, which only offers one puzzle per day on its website, has amassed millions of players since it came online last October.
But the Twitter profile that called itself ‘The Wordlinator’ (@wordlinator) seemed determined to ruin the fun for players posting their scores.
It’s thought that the person behind the account found the upcoming winning words by simply looking at the Wordle web page’s source code.
The hugely popular web game Wordle asks players to guess a five-letter word in six tries every day
WHAT IS WORDLE?
Wordle is deceptively simple; you have six chances to guess a five-letter word.
After each guess, each letter will turn green, yellow or grey, meaning:
Green: correct letter, correct spot
Yellow: correct letter, wrong spot
Grey: wrong letter
You can then use these clues for your next guess.
Try the game here
‘The account referenced was suspended for violating the Twitter Rules and the Automation Rules around sending unsolicited @mentions,’ a Twitter spokesperson told AFP.
The mean-spirited ‘Wordlinator’ automatically responded to accounts posting their Wordle scores with the message: ‘Guess what. People don’t care about your mediocre linguistic escapades. To teach you a lesson, tomorrow’s word is…’ followed by the next day’s answer.
One Wordle fan on Twitter said: ‘Just what kind of sick, twisted person do you have to be to hate the sight of people enjoying a harmless activity so much you hack Wordle?’
Another Twitter user said: ‘Amazing how fast Twitter can respond to important issues.’
According to a screenshot posted by Chicago-based programmer Dan Nguyen, the offending Twitter account was still active as recently as Monday (January 24). The account was suspended on Wednesday, according to AFP.
Twitter said it does not tolerate its platform being used to harass other users, although it did not specify if the messages left by @wordlinator constituted this harassment, or just because it was ruining people’s fun.
Twitter’s policy also notes that sending unsolicited, aggressive or bulk mentions, replies or direct messages warrants suspension from the platform or deleting of the account in question.
According to Nguyen, someone discovered the list of upcoming words can be found in site code, so ‘spoiler bots were inevitable’.
In fact, Robert Reichel, a software engineer currently at GitHub, has posted an entire blog on how he managed to pick apart the source code and get the right answer on the first try every day.
A quick search of Thursday’s Wordle answer on Twitter also reveals people knew it days in advance, suggesting the answers are being leaked by several sources.
Wordle is deceptively simple; you have six chances to guess a five-letter word. Each time you guess a letter in the correct position, the letter goes green. Earlier in January, Wordle fans in the UK were left frustrated after the American spelling of ‘favour’ was revealed as an answer
Though Wordle gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word, does not have a mobile app and is only available on a web browser, the game has quickly caught on.
This is partly thanks to users’ ability to share their scores in green, yellow and grey grids on social media.
To play the game, people have to go to the Wordle webpage on the site of Wordle’s creator, Wales-born software engineer Josh Wardle.
At the beginning of November, the simple game had only 90 players; now there are said to be 3 million.
Earlier in January, UK Wordle fans were left frustrated after the US spelling of ‘favour’ was revealed as an answer, leading to what a fan declared as a ‘diplomatic incident’.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ONLINE GAME THAT’S TAKEN THE WORLD BY STORM
Wordle was originally created by Wales-born software engineer Josh Wardle for his girlfriend Palak Shah who loved word puzzles.
Wardle, who lives in Brooklyn, graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2006.
Having first played the game with Ms Shah, he shared it with his family on WhatsApp, where it proved so popular that he opened it up to the world.
At the beginning of last November Wordle had 90 players by New Year, more than 300,000 people were taking part in the daily challenge and the numbers are still rising.
Once a day, the game invites players to guess a five-letter word by visiting the Wordle website. They are given six turns to guess the word.
After each guess, correct letters in the right place turn green, while correct letters in the wrong place turn yellow. Any letters that turn grey can be ignored as they are not in the word.
Players are able to share their attempts on social media in the form of coloured grids.
There is just one Wordle per day.
Wordle’s initial list of all of the five-letter words in the English language – about 12,000 – contained obscure words the couple thought would have been near impossible to guess.
Wardle eventually narrowed the list of Wordle words to about 2,500, which should last for a few years.
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