Adam Drobiec / EyeEm
If you’re one of the many, many people hooked on Wordle—and especially if you’re someone who likes to share your spoiler-free results publicly each day—we have a word of warning for you. There are people who are determined to spoil your good time by shoving tomorrow’s Wordle answer in your face.
The spoiler Twitter account Wordlinator was one of the most prominent trolls on the scene, describing itself as “sent from the future to terminate wordle bragging.” @Wordlinator would reply to seemingly random Wordle-results tweets with impolite messages designed to “teach you a lesson” by including the answer to the next day’s game (as archived here).
It’s not hard
Wordlinator and its ilk take advantage of Wordle‘s less-than-secure Javascript coding, which lists the answer to all 2,315 of the game’s five-letter puzzles in daily order in a plaintext array buried in publicly viewable files referenced in the webpage’s source code.
Note: if you like tweeting your wordIe scores, someone’s made a bot you should block as it auto-responds with tomorrows answer pic.twitter.com/u62kBaTivn
— dan nguyen (@dancow) January 24, 2022
Obfuscating future answers probably wasn’t a high priority when Wordle was originally created as a fun distraction for creator Josh Wardle’s partner and some friends. Now that the game is a worldwide phenomenon, though, trolls are taking advantage of the lax security to effectively see into the future and spoil the fun.
Wordlinator, which was still active as of Monday afternoon, has now been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules (likely due to Twitter’s policy on spam and unsolicited replies). But while Wordlinator has been taken down, there’s nothing stopping others from using the same method to ruin Wordle just because they can. Just today, I stumbled on this TikTok user, who brags about creating a Python script that can “email the Wordle solution to my enemies at midnight every night.”
To that bot-creator and everyone else who feels the need to troll the world in this way, may we suggest simply muting the word “Wordle” on your social media app of choice or politely asking your friends to stop sharing their results? Ruining Wordle for everyone else doesn’t make you a cool countercultural iconoclast; it just makes you the latest version of the people screaming about Professor Dumbledore in 2005 (warning, 16-year-old spoilers in that link).
