Twitter suspended "The Wordlinator," an account that appeared to spoil the next day'sWordle answer for players.- Wordle, a game where users have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, has skyrocketed in popularity.
Twitter on Wednesday suspended a bot account that appeared to automatically reply to tweets and spoil the next day's answer for Wordle, the five letter word-guessing game that's ignited the internet.
The account, simply called "The Wordlinator," had just 48 followers as of midday Monday, but several
As of late Monday afternoon, the account was no longer available to view, and its page said it was suspended for violating Twitter's rules.
Twitter did not return Insider's request for comment about what rules the account violated.
While bots are permitted on Twitter, according to a 2020 blog post on its website, certain behaviors are prohibited. Bots that "undermine and disrupt the public conversation," artificially amplify conversations, generate "false engagements," engage in "bulk or aggressive tweeting," and those that "use hashtags in a spammy way," are banned, according to the platform.
Searching for The Wordlinator on Twitter brought up numerous tweets showing the account had replied to users who posted their Wordle grid — a sequence of emoji squares generated by the game that shows how many attempts it took a user to guess the five-letter word — and derided them for posting it.
The account's comments appeared to be automatically generated from a set bank of replies, as the account made the same reply to multiple people.
"Guess what. People don't care about your mediocre linguistic escapades," read an especially stinging reply. All of the account's replies ended with the following day's purported Wordle answer.
It was unclear who ran the account, and the account did not respond to a request for comment prior to it being suspended.
The account appeared to know the next day's Wordle through reverse-engineering the game, a tactic first noted by the security software engineer Robert Reichel.
In a blog post on January 9, Reichel described how he found out that Wordle was coded to be entirely client-side, meaning the answers were already contained in a player's web browser.
Insider reverse-engineered the website and found a JavaScript file in the page's source
Insider also found a separate bank of alphabetized words inside the file, and it was unclear what purpose they served.
Josh Wardle, the game's founder, told the New York Times that he originally created Wordle for his partner because she was a fan of word-oriented games. It was released to the wider public in October.
Wardle did not respond to a request for comment.