A Twitter bot has been going around spoiling wordle words for the game's fans and the platform has suspended the bot for flouting its automation rules that forbid spamming or bothering users.
The bot, @wordlinator, has been going around sending the next day's word to people who were tweeting their wordle results. The answers that the account shared seemed to be accurate, ruining the game for those who tweeted their results and who unfortunately chanced upon those tweets.
Just in case you have taken a break from the internet or have managed to avoid it somehow, Wordle is a deceptively simple word-guessing game that gives you six chances to guess a five-letter word. The game can be played only once every 24-hours making it an instant addiction among all those who have tried it.
Since the answer is the same for everyone playing the game during the said 24 hours, guessing the word of the day has become a sort of a competition among friends.
Wordle was originally designed by software engineer Josh Wardle for his puzzle-loving partner, Palak Shah. After playing it for long on their sofa and noticing how their friends loved the game, Wardle made the game public.
The game has seen such a spectacular rise in its popularity that the number of people playing it daily rose from 90 in November, to 3,00,000 at the beginning of January to a whopping 2 million by the first weekend of January.
Wordle's popularity is partially attributed to a very clean playing interface that doesn't blare ads at the face of the player. The fact that the game was deliberately built to be played only once a day and doesn't bombard the player with notifications to grab their attention also helps.
If you have seen a lot of grey, yellow and green squares on Twitter, chances are very high that they are either wordle results or memes about the game.
Seeing its popularity and the effort the game's lovers are putting to share their scores by typing in coloured emojis, Wardle built a share feature into the game which lets players share the results without spoiling that day's word for others.
There still could be other bots on the internet that are spoiling the game, as the list of five-letter words that Wordle uses has already been figured out by the internet. The code of the game's website apparently contains this list.