Twitter has banned a bot linked to Wordle whose sole purpose was to spoil… the unpublished word of the next day by spamming those who shared their score on the social network.
For several days, a little habit has undoubtedly nourished your daily life: in addition to coffee — or tea, or orange juice — in the morning, you launch the page wordle to test your knowledge of English vocabulary. And imagine that routine being ruined by a bot spreading its science on Twitter by leaking the word of the day.
” Note: if you like tweeting your scores on Wordle, someone has created a bot that you should block since it gives automatic replies with the next day solution “, indicates Dan Nguyen in a tweet published on January 24. According to an article published by The Verge the same day, Twitter has already taken steps to ban the account answering the name of @wordlinator, knowing that it had experienced a first suspension shortly after its creation according to NME. The social network is indeed very strict with automatic responses.
How does the bot know the Wordle of the next day?
As a reminder, wordle is a simplistic game reminiscent of Motus: each day, you have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. The principle is based on the sequence of failures which reveal, little by little, which letters are contained in the answer and, above all, in which place they are. Obviously, the creator of @wordlinator was fed up with the craze around wordle and, above all, of all those people who proudly share their score.
“ I was sent from the future to end the bragging around Wordle “, could we read in description of the account. Obviously, its creator would have used the work of engineer Robert Reichel, who had fun doing reverse engineering to unlock the secrets of wordle in order to obtain the answer of the day and that of the next day.
He shared his find in a blog post on January 9, concluding: “ Go ahead, try! He certainly wasn’t expecting a rogue to hijack his research and turn it into a spam bot.
Some victims have therefore received very aggressive messages such as ” My God, stop bragging. Take back your life with tomorrow’s answer: XXXXX ” or ” Guess what, nobody cares about your poor language experiences. To teach you a lesson, here is the word of tomorrow: XXXXX. »
As good old Alfred would say in the movie The Dark Knight : “ Some men have no logical purpose. You cannot buy them, intimidate them, reason with them or negotiate with them. Some men just want to see the world burn. »