A simple word game has taken the world by storm to the point that a Twitter bot has been on a mission to destroy it.
Wordle, the much-loved free online game by Josh Wardle, recently became the target of a devious plan to derail players' experience.
The game allows players six guesses to discover one five-letter word. There's only one per day, and it's the same word for everyone, but this bot started sharing tomorrow's word with anyone who posted their score on the short-form social media platform.
Scroll through this photo gallery to see more games to play similar to 'Wordle':
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'Hello Wordl' is a remake of 'Wordle' and is played in the same way, except you can do it more than once and change the length of the words. -
'Absurdle' is the 'adversarial variant' of 'Wordle'. -
'Letterle' is a mischievous spoof game that makes players guess a single letter each day. -
'Letterpress' is an unlimited, free game where you unscramble tiles to spell words against friends and random opponents. -
'Word Forward' features a 5x5 grid of letter combinations that you can use to make words. -
'Kitty Letter' is from the makers of 'Exploding Kittens'. -
'SpellTower' is like 'Tetris' meets 'Boggle'. -
'TypeShift' allows players to spell words using sliding letters in columns. -
'Word Master' is strikingly similar to 'Wordle' except you can play more than one a day. -
'Wordle' has gone viral and amassed hundreds of thousands of players in a few months. AFP
It all started with Robert Reichel, a software engineer, who has reverse-engineered the game's algorithm to get the right answers on the first try, every time.
He figured out that the word for each day is embedded in the page, with 2,315 words to pick from.
“The word of the day doesn’t get embedded in page load – it’s derived from the wordlist somehow,” he wrote on his website.
“Wordle doesn’t make any web requests when verifying your answer – everything is client-side."
With these two key points of information, Reichel was able to figure out how Wordle was selecting new words.
This exercise in curiosity was used for nefarious means, however, when an anonymous person programmed a bot to automatically reply to Wordle users sharing scores on social media.
The account is called The Wordlinator (@wordlinator) and its bio reads: “I was sent from the future to terminate Wordle bragging."
Thankfully, Twitter has now suspended the bot from the platform, but not before it upset plenty of Wordle fans.
"Whoever made the Wordle spoiler bot is so pathetic. It’s just some fun! Let people have fun!" one Twitter user wrote.
"Who has time to make a Wordle bot with spoilers like you must be so jobless," wrote another with a crying face emoji.
