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Twitter Suspends Wordle-Ruining Bot (theverge.com) 41

Posted by BeauHD from the stop-ruining-the-fun dept.
Twitter has banned @wordlinator, a bot that replied to people's Wordle posts with rude messages that include spoilers for the next day's game. The Verge reports: The account's spoilers appeared to be accurate (the key is easily accessible in the game's code, so it's not necessarily a surprise), which could end up ruining the game for anyone who sees them. [...] Given that the game is about guessing a word, knowing what the next one will be can ruin the entire point. It's also one of those things that's almost impossible to put out of your head -- when you've seen what the next word is, you probably won't be able to forget it no matter how hard you try. Further reading: Wordle Is a Love Story
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Twitter Suspends Wordle-Ruining Bot More

Twitter Suspends Wordle-Ruining Bot

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  • Some people just have to shit on other people's fun. If you don't like seeing it in your feed, add "wordle" to your muted words list. FFS.

  • Suppressing Conservative Voices again. (Score:3, Funny)

    by t.reagan ( 7420066 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:09PM (#62204777)
    That bot needs to join Parlor.

  • Will they ban anyone who posts a movie spoiler? (Score:3)

    by ayesnymous ( 3665205 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:18PM (#62204801)
    Just to be consistent.

    • Will they ban anyone who posts a movie spoiler?

      A bot that automatically sent spoilers to anyone hash tagging a movie on Twitter? I'll bet they would cancel that account also after a slew of complaints.

      It's a little bit less clear cut as many of those people might have seen the movie, while 100% of the people talking about Wordle on Twitter would not have played the next days game.

  • Policy Violation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Barny ( 103770 ) on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:18PM (#62204805) Journal

    Plain and simple, this violates Twitter's API/bot automation policy [twitter.com].

    Section II
    Part B: Automated Tweets
    2. Posting automated mentions and replies

    The reply and mention functions are intended to make communication between Twitter users easier. Automating these actions to reach many users on an unsolicited basis is an abuse of the feature, and is not permitted. For example, sending automated replies to Tweets based on keyword searches alone is not permitted. Spammy or duplicative use of mentions and replies may result in enforcement action, such as the removal of your Tweets from Search or the suspension of your app or account.

    Nothing to see here. Move along.

  • I'm not a Wordle player, but let me know if this TL;DR summary is correct.

    1- Wordle made a competitive multiplayer online game, and put zero effort in securing it (all solutions are available client-side, and it is trivial to cheat).
    2- People on the internet figured it out (OMG hackers!) and used the solutions to troll other users.
    3- Somehow, no one is blaming Wordle for their laughable security choices.
    • Oh, and of course the best part:

      4- people decided that the best solution to this problem is censorship.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      It's a *single* player puzzle game that has apparently attracted a pretty decent following, basically a word based variation on the old guess the peg colour/position game. I have a hunch it'll turn out to be 2022's "Sudoku" or "2048" and expect there will be an XKCD strip on it at some point. It probably appeals to the kind of people who like "Scrabble" since it combines a good knowledge of words, albeit all of five letters, with some strategy/logic about letter patterns and frequency. There really isn't

      • "My guess is that the bot's author figured out the seed, word selection algorithm, "

          Sounds like the hidden "super advanced" mode.

          But going around and posting the answer like a real dickbag was a shitty thing to do.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      1 - No. it's neither competitive nor multiplayer. It's simple and fun. It doesn't really need "security", any more than a text adventure from the 90s does.
      2 - Yes
      3 - Why on earth would they? It's a like a book of mazes or crossword puzzles... you know the ones... with the solutions - gasp - at the back??

      If some asshat is sitting behind you while you work on a crossword in the book, shouting the answers because they looked at the back ... do you blame the publisher for 'laughable security' or do you blame t

      • It collects success statistics which can be used as a score and it supports sharing your game progress to social media. Of course it's a competitive multiplayer game, sugar.

        • the statistics are a cookie which you can easily lose. And sharing the results with your friends is a unicode cut & paste that you can trivially modify before you post it. Cheating at Wordle is only cheating yourself, but sometimes worth it if you can mess with your friends.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          So... It finally clicked why you called me 'sugar'. :)

          So instead of being weird and awkwardly off-putting on the internet, I now see you for the hilarious troll you were shooting for :)

      • All players play the same puzzle, and there's a wide number of fans that publish their "grid" (just the colors, without the letters) on twitter. This makes it competitive, doesn't it?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          People can compete casually at *anything*, that doesn't rise to the threshold where the developer should be held accountable for eliminating cheating. They're not organizing a tournament or anything where anyone expects there to be any real integrity.

          Next you'll be telling me that I should be harassing my local miniature golf course for their lax security because of the rampant cheating I've witnessed (and engaged in) there when playing.

          Anyone taking worldle scores seriously is an idiot.

          • Back in the old days, a kid figured out that you could just sneak under the unguarded turnstyle in the 'fun house' at Chuck E Cheese. Another, more creative kid figured out how to get unlimited plays on the mechanical coin/token operated pool table.

    • I'm not a Wordle player, but let me know if this TL;DR summary is correct.

      1- Wordle made a competitive multiplayer online game, and put zero effort in securing it (all solutions are available client-side, and it is trivial to cheat).
      2- People on the internet figured it out (OMG hackers!) and used the solutions to troll other users.
      3- Somehow, no one is blaming Wordle for their laughable security choices.

      Wordle is is free to play game. For a single player. It's hackable and sure, it's easy to fake your score if you're into that kind of thing. Plus while it's unsafe that the word list is in the code, even if it it wasn't: The word of the day would be out seconds after a day starts. No point in securing this.

      Writing a bot that spoils the game for other people because of this is a dick move and if twitter house rules allow to kick dicks out, all the better.

    • Trying to secure Wordle would be even harder than suppressing DeCSS. Remember that? They printed it on T-shirts. The answer to the daily Wordle is literally just a five-letter word. As soon as the first person solves it (and there's always somebody who's amazingly fast or guesses it on the first try) that cat is out of the bag and it's open to spoilers.

      This is not a security issue that you can put on the developers. At some point there has to be a thing called etiquette or sportsmanship to keep some ga

  • Why (Score:1)

    by robi5 ( 1261542 )

    Why do people post weird color rectangles to begin with, and who do they think will care about their arbitrary looking rectangles? Is this game designed such that posting to social media is integral to the gameplay and not just some kind of bragging outlet? It's an effective ad I guess but I wouldn't spam the timeline of other folks for my own game. Does this thing make it impossible to play without the "social emissions"? I'm not gonna get hyped to join just by looking at some random colored rectangles

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by oxfletch ( 108699 )

      People being smug about their own cleverness.
      But then twitter is mostly self-centered narcissistic bullshit, so ... should fit right in.

      • My English teacher said I would amount to nothing, so I paste her my best wordle every chance I get.

      • That might be true in some cases, but is demolished by even a cursory examination of tweets for a typical puzzle. In fact for some of them, most of the replies are about how the player *lost*. They're not bragging. They're commiserating. I think it's actually one of the nicer trends on Twitter. It's certainly way, way better than Twitter's typical sport of trying to find racism where it doesn't exist, as if racism were in short supply.

  • If you use Twitter... (Score:3)

    by rantrantrant ( 4753443 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @09:18AM (#62205667)
    ...simply filter out all messages with Wordle related keywords. Simple. No need for rude bots.

  • Sure, it's a simple TOS violation, but the fact that someone went to the effort to build it shows exactly why we can't have nice things. People were enjoying it, so it's critical that SOMEONE take a steaming greasy shit on it.

    That's a hot take of all of human history, btw.

    (To be clear, I'm NOT a wordle player or fan. To me it seems a fairly banal little puzzle game and I'm genuinely mystified by the weird need people have to /share/ it. Who possibly gives a shit if you solved a dumb little word game?)

  • If you are wondering where you have seen the concept of worldle before, it's taken the core gameplay of this gameshow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    (which probably took inspiration from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )

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