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Comment by hanspeter | Hacker News Reader

They could serve the correct words from server side so that it's not trivial to find them.

The original creator was not able to do that due to infrastructure limitations, but surely NYT would have the proper setup to handle that.

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So the fun word game stops working while commuting by train because it needs to stop me "cheating" in a purely fun /social game by phoning home during the time I have to play it, where the connection is spotty at best, and the quick game loop of guess, read result, think gets janked because of railway cuttings and tunnels?

All because someone coukd read the source to cheat and wouldn't, idk, just copy paste the squares about in their tweets?

Exactly. It's somewhat baffling to me how some people focus so much on the technology aspects of something to the point of forgetting that its success is due to the things that it does not do.

Again, how does that improve the game?

For context, a Twitter bot was recently banned for automatically replying to Wordle tweets and spoiling the next day's word. Preventing that would improve the gameplay experience by defending against malicious disruption.

We know that wordle is completely trivial for computers to solve. Hiding the solutions won’t do anything to stop that particular behavior.

The game is perfect as is, and I’m sad that it will now be used to make money.

Not really. The bot can get its data from when NZ hits midnight, hours and hours before America and Europe etc. Even if it was always released at the exact same time globally, nothing to stop a bot solving it / fetching it immediately and replying to users posts from yesterday about what todays one is.

It always loads fast. Quite a nice feature..

I don't see a point of this. I could probably find the correct word for today by Googling so server/client side does not make any difference if we all share the same word for the day which is I think the major feature behind the success.

Is this to stop you from cheating?

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