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If you’ve been enjoying waking up each morning, playing the word game Wordle and sharing your score with followers on social media, you may have experienced a rude surprise in response.
After the algorithm the Wordle creator uses to choose each day’s word was cracked, a soulless Twitter bot showed up and began posting the spoiler to the next puzzle in response to their social media post.
So, if you were hoping your mentions would be full of praise from followers complimenting you on a “nice job, dude!” following your 2/6 score, what you got was tomorrow’s quiz completely ruined for you.
The bot, called The Wordlinator, has now been suspended by Twitter, after users began seeing replies along the lines of: “Guess what. People don’t care about your mediocre linguistic escapades. To teach you a lesson, tomorrow’s word is…”
The game has taken the web by storm in recent weeks, despite being around for close to a year. It requires you to guess a five-letter word with no clues other than the letters you guess. Wordle will tell you if you’ve picked a correct letter and whether it’s in the right or wrong position. It’s eminently satisfying and often a real brain teaser to figure out the word within the allotted six guesses.
It can be annoying when people even try to give you clues to the puzzles, but to have them spoiled completely robs a little bit of joy from the days when there has been somewhat less these last couple of years.
Finding out how the game worked wasn’t the handiwork of the bot-master. One developer reverse engineered the game‘s freely-available source code and posted the methodology online. Wordlinator just leveraged that work out of spite.
As The Verge points out, the bot may have been banned for breaking Twitter’s rules on automated accounts. Those rules ask users not to “spam or bother users, or otherwise send them unsolicited messages.” This would definitely fit the bill. Don’t be surprised if the bot shows up again under a different guise though.
If you’re annoyed by dozens of people posting their Wordle results online, then that’s also ok. Maybe just try and think of it as someone bringing a little levity to their day, huh?
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