Wordle Now Redirects to NYT | Hacker News Reader

Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

160 pointsklohto203 comments

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Changed font, added hamburger menu, as well as tracking of course.

Rejecting the cookie banner pops up a timed overlay (only appearing after you dismiss the game's onboarding guide) telling you that your cookie preferences are saved, unless you don't save cookies...

If you don't save cookies, this appears for 5 or so seconds above the keyboard every time you load the site.

A small nag, but a good reminder of the decay in user experience as soon as sites start adding tracking and similar. Wordle worked fine without this, but there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.

> there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.

I pay their $4.99/month subscription for access to their "Games" package solely because it includes access to their full archive of daily crosswords (going back to 1993).

If they add a similar "archive" of the daily Wordles and allow payed users to replay past puzzles, that could presumably provide new value to them by enticing more paying customers.

FYI, there's already an archive that's free to use. [1] Although it shows basic stats, I was surprised that it doesn't show stats on how many guesses you took.

1: https://metzger.media/games/wordle-archive

Thanks. This is the first time I've tried it. I have no idea what the rules are. Oh well.

Aha, the most "innocent" of dark patterns.

How did Wordle track your progress and stats before? localStorage? I feel like this change is very subtle and very user friendly for an acquisition.

It is so tiring to continue to see this justification for something. Just because some other unnamed thing is worse, is not a reason to be only 'a little bit bad'.

Do you think that, on its own, adding cookie popups is very user friendly and very subtle? We shouldn't explain away an action because 'someone else is worse'.

It was all in localstorage, yeah. You can still see a lot of it in localstorage, albeit with a bit more things there than before.

I t had to be individual browser cookies - because I could redo the puzzle in multiple browsers on the same device all with different histories

It still uses localStorage - see the key "nyt-wordle-state" in the new site.

They've also removed the following from the list of words in future games

wench, slave, fibre, agora, pupal, lynch

And removed the following from the list of words that are accepted as guesses (in addition to the above ones):

gooks, darky, pussy, spick, spics, bitch, fagot, dyked, coons, spiks, sluts, dykey, faggy, homos, chink, dykes, lesbo, kikes, whore

Most of those I get, but why did fibre, agora, and pupal get pulled?

I would guess they simply applied their existing word game dictionary — probably the same one they use for “Spelling Bee”.

It doesn’t include slurs, uses US-spellings (at least in the US), and intentionally doesn’t include “obscure” words, though obviously that’s a judgement call. (Spelling Bee has an email link if you want to dispute an exclusion — I believe I helped get “ichor” added to the list.)

Spelling Bee accepts agora. Spelling Bee and LetterBoxed have very different dictionaries. Spelling Bee is way more “strict.”

Fibre could be because it might annoy American players who object to non-American English spellings.

Pupal and agora I really don't get. Maybe some uneducated players would think pupal was some dirty word (related to poop???), but agora has no negative association that I can imagine.

As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.

> As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.

The word lists were (and are) in the site's javascript, readable for anyone who cares to look.

Agora is the leading drug Darknet Marketplace.

That is surely it, it is the only (negative) connotation and incident in culture.

Oh, for chrissakes. As if nobody ever read about classical Greece.

(Upvoted for the info, which I'll bet is right. Christ.)

And now here we are talking about it. Bit of a Streisand effect, that.

Maybe, but Agora was shut down in 2015.

Ahh, that'll do it. Fascinating.

sheesh!

Maybe they’re agora-phobic.

This comment just made the etymology of "agoraphobic" click for me!

I considered this, but there's nothing wrong about "just another phobia", even if it may be the meta-phobia-to-rule-them-all.

The self-circular nature of agoraphobia is fascinating to contemplate though :)

FIBRE is spelt FIBER in American English.

AGORA is a rarely-used word and is probably not in the dictionary referenced by The NY Times for their word puzzles.

PUPAL may be mis-perceived as a misspelling of PUPIL and frustrate players. I don’t know… I’m guessing!

Probably reasonable guesses.

Though, I'd expect these to be moved to allowed guesses, there's some very obscure stuff in the allowed guess list.

Probably just a first pass by whoever's in charge of standards. Now I'm trying to guess if this was a simple pass with an "approved words" list, or if there was a mind-numbing meeting where they spent a day or two looking at words.

As someone from British English nation, there's no way I'm ever likely to guess FIBER unless I've exhausted FIBRE first. It breaks the brain. The ER phenomenon goes against every fibre of my being.

Also from a Commonwealth nation and I prefer the -er spelling. It looks more balanced, take the word center as an example, it plain looks nicer, and having a vowel flow onto a consonant for a hard ending means the spelling matches the actual pronunciation. I think centre at first glance would suggest a more French pronunciation - "cen-tray".

That said, I'll never forgive American English for what it did to Aluminium. The word Aluminium just sparkles and glitters like the metal itself, whereas Aluminum has a distinctly cold sound, like an echo in an empty hall early on a winter's morning.

As a Canadian I have a weird mishmash that looks right to me. I'd actually use both center and centre in different contexts. Like, the center of a circle is clearly center, but a rec centre looks better that way! (Notwithstanding the red underline my browser with its own preference is giving me...)

Wrong. Agora was accepted as of March 26, 2021 — and I’m quite certain it’s been seen since.

https://nytspellingbeeanswers.org/nyt-spelling-bee-answers-0...

Well they had "humor" and that's an actual misspelling :D

Not in American English. That's spelled correctly.

I don't really see the motivation for removing slurs, etc, from the available guess list in a game where you are the only one who sees your guesses. Good of them to take the words with unpleasant associations out of the solutions list, though.

Staying clear of the woke crossword folks.

The Wall Street Journal's puzzles are edited by Mike Shenk. For years - going back to when he was in college - he published puzzles under the name "Marie Kelly" (an anagram of "REALLY MIKE"). Then, one day, the people at crosswordfiend.com decided that was unacceptable - that potential female crossword designers would be put off by the fact that a man was publishing crosswords under a woman's name. And, obviously, we need more female crossword designers. As well as more female answers to crossword clues. And don't even think about publishing a crossword that has, say, FASCIST as an answer - they don't want to see such an awful word.

I wish I was joking.

A lot of this game is yet to be solved- it would be rather unfortunate if one of the most useful words in a top strategy happened to be a slur, meaning that those wishing to "solve" the game would likely have to include said slur in their strategy.

Otherwise, yes, it should rarely be an issue.

I guess that is possible.

None of them look great, intuitively. Actually it is kind of interesting, although unsurprising on second thought, that the removed words skew toward these harsh g and k noises which don't show up as much elsewhere in English. So they don't look like good first picks. But maybe at some point strategies will advance to having common second picks or something like that.

I would be motivated to do it. If you were a happy wordle player and also have a marginalized identity, it might suck to finally get the word right and see a slur against that identity bouncing across the screen in happy green letters. Seems to me like this makes Wordle a more welcoming game.

I believe they were removed from the "valid guesses" dictionary and not the "answers" dictionary.

Imagine this scenario.

People can easily make a whole game panel of these word guesses, then post a screen shot on social media. Then cancel culture mob takes over.

I don't see much being held to that standard, for example you can write these words in notepad but nobody has come for Microsoft on this front.

Imagine this scenario, you open Wordle to guess the word for the day. You put in your guesses and manage to guess it right, but it's a slur that's been used against you on many occasions and now you have to relive traumatic episodes, when all you wanted was a positive experience?

The game has two word lists -- a "possible solution" set and an "allowed guess" set. They removed:

* some words with negative connotations from the solution set

* slurs from the allowed guess set

As such, I believe there already weren't any slurs in the possible solution set. Or at least they weren't in the group of words which were mentioned as removed here. So, your scenario was already not possible.

I think removing the words with negative connotations from the solution set was a great move because, while they aren't slurs, there's no need to give people that negative experience.

So your solution is to "pre-cancel" yourself?

1984 explains the motivation.

The wordle code has two distinct arrays: the list of answers and the list of other words you can guess. If you carelessly remove words from the answers you will also make it impossible to guess them. I figure they removed some answers without adding them to the acceptable guesses because they didn’t think about it.

Fibre, agora and pupal are a little esoteric. Not as much as many words on the SOWPODS list, but enough to perhaps be annoying.

I see the Spelling Bee editors have taken over...

I’ve always found that the Wordle solution word is very common. So agora and pupal would be surprising in that regard.

Fibre - confusing British vs American spelling

Agora & pupal - probably the repeated letters? Or they are just too obscure.

Non-US spelling?

They forgot 'Trump'

> why did fibre, agora, and pupal get pulled

No idea for fibre, but agora and pupal have repeated letters. Are there other words in the accepted wordlist with repeated letters?

Yes, there are 689 words left with 4 distinct letters, 57 with 3, and 1 word left that just has 2 distinct letters in it.

That word is a common enough English word ... warning, this is a spoiler for a puzzle that should appear in about 5 years ... "mamma"

I solved one the other week with repeated letters, answer was elder.

Yes we had KNOLL as an answer recently.

I would guess they just got removed because they were obscure. I remember past words with repeated letters.

'elder' is there

They paid the money to own it. I am not mad about it. You can literally save the HTML and play it if you really care not to see NYT logo.

This is a good story for an indie game to be honest

Surely the creator could have made more money by serving ads or something. I doubt the NYT paid them the full lifetime value of the site.

And anyway, isn't the NYT supposed to be reporting news or something? Since when has the most prestigious newspaper become a hub for fooling around?

I'm sure it likely sold for enough that the owners can retire early and wealthy. Maybe they'd get more money serving ads, or maybe it's a fad and it dies out in a month or two. I'd rather just take the payout and move onto other personal projects, given that Wordle is pretty much complete.

> made more money by serving ads

That seems pretty unlikely. As a funnel to NYT games, the NYT decided this thing was worth over a million. It's very questionable whether Wardle could have extracted a million in revenue from ads on Wordle.

Do you know how much ads pay? It's peanuts. And really, the "full lifetime value" isn't much. These fads die out really quickly.

If anything, this is a win for almost everyone. Dev gets paid handsomely, code still remains available for people who care, and the experience seems mostly unchanged for people who don't.

The NYT has a games section; it brings in money that helps pay for journalism. And they've been publishing the crossword since 1942, so this isn't a brand-new idea.

It's entertainment, for the most part, and always has been. Crosswords have been popular in the NYT forever.

Ads would've resulted in people complaining about user experience. And no one pays a full "lifetime" for anything. For an acquisition like this it's usually a multiple of 5 years of earnings. Probably more because of the popularity.

What the heck? You want the guy to run ads on the site because you don't like the NYT? Thank god he didn't do that. What was the lifetime value in your eyes? Adding popups and paywalls like many other online games? He made > $1 million dollars.

I never said I don't like the NYT. It's important to read only what people say, not combine what they say with what you think.

I didn't realize he got over a million bucks. In that case, it was a good move. I doubt ads would've paid that much.

As soon as he'd start serving ads people would leave in droves.

I've been working on a clean-room reimplementation that uses the original word list and is visually similar to the original, but also allows for playing unlimited puzzles each day: https://wrd.li

(The order of the solutions is different than the original, and is randomized each day.)

Honest q: could you get sued for that? Likely at least a cease and desist, right?

There are - literally, and at the moment of this post - 473 referenced Wordle clones in 118 languages. Among those 473 clones, very few derive from the original Wordle rules or layout.

https://rwmpelstilzchen.gitlab.io/wordles/

Sure you always can. Will it be ruled against them? Its a pretty trivial and not unique site/game.

Pretty nice implementation, but it's missing the best feature: social sharing

You're in luck! You can view completed puzzles by clicking the grid icon in the top right, and you can copy a Wordle-style sharing blurb by clicking on an individual puzzle.

I'll take the feedback that this feature should definitely be made more obvious.

I like it! However there is no "hard" mode where clues have to be used.

Love it, my girlfriend and I are on puzzle 8 now, thank you. Add a tip jar.

They bought eyes and personal data, probably for a steal.

But I don't bemoan the Wardle heehee guy who sold it. I'm very happy for him.

The game concept isn't unique. It just struck a nice balance of complexity and simplicity that satisfied a large audience. It reminds me of Threes game in that way.

As for the commercialization, "This is the way of things." That's fine. There will be more good ideas, and the beauty here is that we are now all free to build them with less distraction. Maybe you'll build something fun and get rich, without having to go through a FAANG (or is it now MAANG?) interview series.

I did the math on this recently. Supposedly NYT paid $3m for Wordle. The NYT games subscription that includes their crossword and potentially Wordle is $40/year. If they put Wordle behind their games subscription, they would need 75k new users to break even in one year. That seems realistic given how popular Wordle is.

I'll also speak anecdotally. As someone who has done the NYT crossword every day for several years... Wordle + the social sharing has been scratching the same itch and I've actually stopped doing the daily NYT crossword. So buying Wordle could also be protective of their existing revenue.

I think your last point is pretty solid — and since Wordle has this interesting angle of not supporting binging, there's an interesting possibility of a gentle upsell (“23 hours until the next Wordle, have you done today's Bee?”)

That's a great point. They could keep Wordle free as lead gen for their paid games subscription. That's probably more profitable than making Wordle paid.

Yeah, thinking about this more definitely makes me curious about what their targets are for this. They paid a fair amount of money up front but keeping the lights on is basically trivial.

So this is a bit silly, but I got today's Wordle with a somewhat lewd slang for a female body part for the second word.

Tried replicating in the NYT version, and said it wasn't in the word list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30294688

Wait, I just played the NYT version and that word was one of my guesses, and it was accepted as a valid guess, but not the right answer. The right answer was an unrelated word with letters in common.

Is there a clone that keeps the old UI and the same answers? (Could possibly scrape the site or twitter posts to determine the answer each day) Wordle isn’t even gone and I already miss it.

I simply downloaded the HTML and rehosted it on my site: https://matthew.science/wordle.html

Crazy how this super simple webpage went insanely viral and is still light enough for anyone to copy and re-host.

Glad that some remnants of ye olde internet are still out there.

https://wordle.nyc

It’s a complete clone of the original Wordle site (which is just HTML, CSS and JS, without any server side code), and was posted here [1] a few weeks ago.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30158391

Wayback machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20220201003547/https://www.power...

Great idea, but this link doesn't really work -- it always has the same secret word, because the Wayback Machine injects some JavaScript to make the Date function return a constant date (try running `console.log(new Date())`).

The link posted by @rossy (with "id_") works fine though.

("id_" stands for "identity" and means to return the original resource without rewriting the content, see https://pywb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manual/rewriter.html#i...)

Even better, you can add id_ to the URL to get the full page without the Wayback Machine banner, which saves screen space on mobile.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220201003547id_/https://www.po...

A Wordle clone with allowed Scrabble words and different word lengths: https://braggle.xyz

I'm content to work through the archived backlog [1] for now, and play my local version after that.

1: https://metzger.media/games/wordle-archive

i'm not getting a 3xx redirect (i assume that's what you mean?), I'm still looking at wordle at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

If I do it in an incognito window... I get the redirect, yup.

I guess my cookies for existin game history keep me at the original site?

I was seeing that yesterday, but I hit refresh this morning and got migrated to the NYT site, with my stats persisted across the migration.

I got migrated to the NYT site today with my stats NOT persisted. :(

I wonder if some kind of security settings i had prevented it somehow.

I used "view source" on the pre-NYT version and got a blob of minified javascript that I was able to run through a prettifier and I guess it is decipherable, but was there an earlier, un-minified version? Like every other hacker who has played it, I'm trying to write a personal clone.

The original WORDLE also used minified JavaScript, but there are some resources on reverse engineering it, if all you're interested is learning how the words are picked [1].

[1]: https://reichel.dev/blog/reverse-engineering-wordle.html

It isn't that complex - If you compare the word list in source to the word each day, you'll see that it is just using the list in order.

Posting this in case anyone is interested, and for my own future reference:

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/08/wordle-reverse-engineering-a...

Ah ok thanks both of you, that suffices. I wondered why the word list was in such a weird order. Any idea if the permutation from alphabetical order is something simple? That would allow membership testing by binary search instead of needing an extra data structure.

I'm sure one talented programmer could code up OpenWordle and put it on GitHub in a few days tops

There are hundreds on GitHub already. It’s the new Fizzbuzz.

I know what my next interview question is gonna be.

Is there a blockchain version yet? I am tempted to code one up.

Excellent 3b1b video about trying to solve wordle using information theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA

Very interesting video. It mentions “crane” being the best opening word when using a sophisticated program. I wonder what the best word would be for a human with an average vocabulary (for a Wordle player). I think there’s a decent chance it’s not the same word because an average player wouldn’t be able to use lots of obscure words to narrow things down super precisely.

Perhaps one could create an algorithm where the list of possible words is an approximation of a human’s actual vocabulary.

Some HN discussion of that video a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30232413

Also, this interesting article was posted to HN the other day:

A Mathematician’s Guide to Wordle

https://aperiodical.com/2022/02/a-mathematicians-guide-to-wo...

"why are people acting like Wordle was some Marxist utopian co-op that got bought by Monsanto"[1]

my fav tweet from all the vitriol a solo developer is getting for selling their personal project

[1] https://twitter.com/quepaso_daniel/status/148858283450784563...

This is a funny tweet, but in some sense it kind of was. It was a mostly universal, fun, communal experience that existed for a short period of time outside the pressures of the profit motive. It was valued for its use and not its exchange, it was free to everyone, and that made it a kind of small commons.

I think everyone knew that couldn’t last. It was either going to fade away or get bought. I don’t personally know anyone who begrudges the developer for cashing out (I would if I were in his shoes), but I’m still a little sad to see the fences start going up around it.

It's a completely client side implementation. You can download it and point any static webserver at it and it works. I.e. making a perfect clone of it is a minute's work and practically free to host.

So I don't agree that "couldn't last" is true. I mean zombo.com is still around, with essentially the same ongoing maintenance burden.

> You can download it and point any static webserver at it and it works.

You don't even need a web server. It works fine if you just save the HTML file to disk and open the file from the browser.

The code is trivial to download or even build your own, but the value of playing the same puzzle as everyone else is what’s getting paywalled. For a lot of people, the fun of wordle was solving the same puzzle and comparing notes with friends and strangers.

Agreed, I'm pretty annoyed with nyt for unnecessarily destroying that (and I do think they are in the process of destroying it). I was just pointing out that the idea it would have failed/died if they hadn't bought it is wrong.

It could have put up a donation page, like Wikipedia.

I don't blame the dev at all, I'd've probably taken the same deal, but an Exit To Community would have been a baller move: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/exit-to-community

Wow, I love this idea

I've not seen a single comment criticising the dev for it. I'm pretty annoyed with the nyt though.

Why? They bought it, they can do whatever they want with it.

They /can/ do whatever they want, that doesn't mean you have to like it.

Except they have done nothing other than move it from his personal URL to their own.

And added trackers and a cookie popup to it, and censored the word lists (guess and solution).

And their own statement about it implied they intend to put it behind a paywall eventually (wording was something like "it will initially remain free for new and existing users").

In 3 month no one talks about it anymore. And until then use waybackmachine.

If they want to put it behind a paywall, charge $100 a game, show Taboola links, or make people log in to a NYT account, that’s their choice. People can vote with their feet then. I just don’t get why folks are so salty. Does everyone on HN work for free?

Again with this bizarre logical nonsequiteur that because they can do something I'm not allowed to be annoyed by it. Second time in this direct chain of replies.

I don't get why people keep making this same completely nonsensical argument. Do you honestly think that whenever a company does something that they are legally permitted to do there is some obligation on everyone else to not feel any negative emotions about it? Is that how you think the world works?

I doubt you or "kertiyoowiyop" do actually think that. I suspect what's happening is that you're perfectly fine with what's happened (which is of course entirely your choice and fine with me) and you're seeing people who aren't, and because you don't share their objections you feel an urge to go around making comments to the effect of "your views are irrelevant, stop whining and deal with it", which is rude, information-free trolling.

If you think there's some actual reason I should agree with you that what the nyt's done here is fine and I have no cause to be annoyed by it then please, let's hear it. Otherwise, just accept that not everyone feels the same way as you about things.

And no, I don't work for free. I do play for free.

I think it strikes an emotional chord with the ongoing trend of private capital enclosing every social Commons it can.

While I don't think it's the right hill to die on (Wordle is a trivially cloneable public good; NYT's actual actions have been relatively mild; there are seventeen trillion bigger fish to fry) one can certainly understand a visceral reaction (violation of sanctity) when "community" bleeds into "corporation", even by the tiniest bit.

I've been playing Wordle as a saved PWA on iOS, wonder how the transfer will work for that.

I just popped it open in Firefox Focus and haven't experienced any issues. Been using it for years for one-off browsing and its content blocker integration with Safari.

I thought it had wiped all the scores because I already played today's. But I think I must have played it during the migration period or something because it was the same word, and after getting it my previous stats are there.

Ooh, if you posted your results to your social media then previous stats could be PII??

Bonus. I solved todays already, so with the redirect I was able to solve it in 1

Disappointed it still releases at 12am for your timezone. Hate this system.

care to elaborate?

The NYT Crossword minis release at 7pm PDT so everyone gets it at the same time. This way, everyone can corroborate times, talk about the puzzle, etc. if you want.

With Wordle releasing at 12am your timezone, it gets confusing when someone could be talking about the next day's or previous day's puzzle.

Send a different timezone to the server?

That doesn't fix their problem. They want everyone on the same schedule so that some people aren't getting it earlier than others. They want everyone to start at the same time.

ohhh, that makes sense - thank you!

Is it possible to tell if they're using the same solutions as were originally projected? I assume these are not hardcoded for all to see anymore.

Also, are they using the same list of valid words as before?

At present, it still functions like the original - the wordlist is present in the JS bundle served from https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

What's the over-under on when they put pop-up ads in the game?

The old word list was 2315 long. The new one is 2309. I understand why they removed some of those 6 words. The other ones I'm not sure.

Looks like someone beat me to it.

https://boingboing.net/2022/02/11/pussy-pupal-and-agora-amon...

What is NYT going to gain from this purchase? Or, what am I giving to NYT when I play this game over coffee every morning?

It was a cheap game for the NYTimes to purchase (low 7-figures so probably $1-4M), it's something that people love, and it'll attract a lot of new people to the NYTimes Games brand. For now, that's probably enough. They threw a few million at someone that created something that lots of people loved and it gives the game the institutional backing to continue on indefinitely. I'm not saying that the guy wouldn't have continued Wordle, but he was one person who might get hit by a bus.

In the long run, the NYTimes has so many options - and if they decide to do nothing other than continue a game people love, it's not like a couple million is an insane sum for them to "waste" on something that puts their brand in front of so many people every day.

1) It makes people aware that the NYTimes has lots of different word game options. 2) It makes people think of the NYTimes a lot. 3) They could put a link to a single story on the page. 4) They could offer an up-sell to a SuperWordle or something as part of their games package that might offer slightly different puzzles (sure, you can get Wordle clones all over the web, but a lot of people might not care about $3-4/mo for an NYTimes Games subscription). 5) Wordle could become premium in the future - or maybe just the Sunday edition is premium.

There are so many options. Some might be less user-friendly, but there are a lot of user-friendly options. When you buy something for cheap, you don't need to leverage it a lot to justify the purchase.

New York Times Games has its own app with various word related daily puzzles. People pay a subscription fee to be able to play the back catalog of crossword for example.

It is a pretty natural and obvious fit.

Just as Atlassian bought Trello to hedge their dominant position in Kanban board hosting, NYT bought Wordle to hedge their dominant position as daily-word-puzzle purveyors.

Is hedge the right term, as in hedging a bet? Or are they reinforcing their dominant position?

I think hedge is the right word. NYT continuously invests in their crossword thinking there'll be a return on their investment (maybe in increased subscriptions). Investing in a line of business is basically an informed bet. NYT wants the crossword to remain dominant. They just bought Wordle on the off-chance it unseats the crossword, hence the term "hedge".

This is just speculation btw, I don't work for NYT or know the true reasons.

You are going to their website, and they will soon start upselling you their games subscription.

So essentially it’s a marketing play?

It redirects on my Mac, but not on my iPhone, which still shows the old version, and I can't figure out why.

I initially thought it was continuing to show the old one on my phone but I just needed to refresh...

It did not redirect me on Edge. I'm in Singapore, so maybe that's why.

Same here, which is fine because I play on my phone anyway.

Saw this before 4pm today and entered the word I solved at 4:30pm yesterday. Solved in 1. :)

Not sure why people are bragging about that (this is the second such comment I saw). You could already solve in on the desktop and then "solve in 1" on your phone, of course.

It transferred over my history just fine for the month or so I've been playing. I only have Firefox Focus on my phone, which is like permanent incognito mode.

They broke the PWA :/

How did they maintain the streaks? I thought that was in local storage

The redirect sent query parameters with the information

huh evidently I've been playing the wrong one with my friends:

https://wordle.nyc/

That seems to be a clone of OG Wordle

It's a pirated version of it.

Did wordle always have a “Hard Mode”?

I can't speak to "always", but it's been there ever since it became popular about a month ago.

Remember when the wordle guy said he doesn’t care about money?

That was a few weeks before he sold it for millions.

Turns out he cared a lot about money after all.

There's not caring about making £50/month from some AdSense code Vs not caring about a £xM payoff.

I'll allow them this one.

From widely published articles:

“Josh Wardle, the dev behind the popular free puzzle game, has no plans to monetize it”

I’d say selling for millions is the most extreme form of monetization.

Why make such claims in the first place?

Not for me as of 70 seconds ago

You can write your own clone with grep, sh and /usr/share/dict/words.

This seems like quite a dismissive comment.

I think there is a lot to be said for the presentation, polish, how easy it is to share, and the idea that everyone sees the exact same puzzle once per day, making it viral as you compete with your friends.

I've never seen grep do that on its own.

https://gist.github.com/huytd/6a1a6a7b34a0d0abcac00b47e3d015...

Minus competing, setting up the script for distros would be crazily easy.

Also, for Android/iOS, generating a clone would be a matter of hours.

I mean maybe if we used shuf with the same seed value for everyone it would work.

If you get everyone on social media who plays Wordle to run shuf, I'll eat my hat.

I bet not even 10% of Wordle players know what the command line is, nevermind shuf...

You can write your own Dropbox clone with curlftpfs too![1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Not the same. You can get the same gameplay with the infamous wordle in Bash stub from Github.

And they broke everybody’s streak in the process while reusing today‘s word…

Way to destroy a good brand.

Apparently the old Wordle URL redirects to the new NYT page, and it includes the statistics as a JSON in the URL so the new page know what's the old statistics is.

Also makes it really easy to forward a user to a nytimes phishing site.

e.g.

"Hey - did you see the new wordle? https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/?url=https://www.exam... "

Seems like hopefully an easy and obvious fix - no need for a fully open redirect here!

Ah, I was wondering how it persisted the stats (which I presumed were stored via localStorage).

Ah! Thank you for this, I was wondering how they preserved the statistics through a move to a whole different site (where the old local storage of course can’t be accessed)

The statistics worked for me too, just the streak was reset.

This is clearly a violation of privacy because the url is unencrypted. NYT may face a billionaire lawsuit and his future is compromised.

The url is encrypted, the entire thing is over tls.

I find the idea amusing that exposing people's wordle scores would result in billion dollar damages. My life was ruined because someone was able to find out 60% of my wins are on 6 guesses!

Ditto. You can fix it:

const d = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem("nyt-wordle-statistics"))

console.log(d)

d.currentStreak = // whatever your streak was

d.gamesPlayed = d.gamesPlayed - 1

d.gamesWon = d.gamesWon - 1

d.guesses["4"] = d.guesses["4"] - 1 // subtract the last game

localStorage.setItem("nyt-wordle-statistics", JSON.stringify(d))

It persisted my streak -- not sure why yours didn't transfer. I did see the onboarding page again.

I'm running Chrome on Win10 and my records survived the migration, so your mileage may vary.

Stretch to call it a brand. haha

It's a brand the nyt considered worth 7 figures.

Interesting. This game has been on Dutch television (Lingo) since I was a small child. (At least if not longer.) what is so special about it?

Colored boxes that you can paste anywhere that supports emoji/whatever that show your final game state.

Sometimes it really is that simple.

Didn’t break my streak.

It appears you have to replay today's word. I play it shortly after midnight and while my stats transferred, it didn't know I'd already played.

Lost my streak :rage:

What the hell is wordle

Does anyone have the original wordle somewhere? I would like to play that one instead

Looks like the wayback machine has multiple copies per day

Pour one out for a rare spot of joy in a dark time. I'll miss my morning Wordle and chatting about it with my friends. But I'll be damned if I go anywhere near a "news" source that gives a climate science denier a platform on its op-ed page, good puzzles or not.

I understand your concern, but newsdesks and op-ed pages aren't run by the same folks in reputable organizations - which leads to situations like the one you are describing.

I mean, not directly, but ultimately they are, right? The guy in charge of the paper?

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