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Comment by mattbuilds | Hacker News Reader

That’s a perfect example of solving for the problem you have and not over engineering.

It's also a perfect example of actually understanding the problem you're trying to solve (which is a prerequisite for not overengineering).

Wordle is a tiny word puzzle game with no stakes. So, while this architecture makes it trivially easy to cheat, there's also zero reason to do so. You're just robbing yourself of the fun in order to... do what, exactly? Brag about it?

Unfortunately it also allows to rob other people of the fun, as there has been multiple Twitter bots spreading the future words. I think one even replied to people's Wordle score tweets.

That's a good example of how just a few malicious knobs ruin the fun for everyone else. I suppose blocking those bots isn't difficult but the fact that someone went out of their way to code one is so sad.

Well... Aren't the twitter bots then the bad actor?

I wouldn't complain that wikipedia exists when I am answering a quiz...

I don't think a more complex wordle implementation would solve this. If the whole world is guessing the same word, there will always be someone that tries to spoil it for others, just because they can.

> Well... Aren't the twitter bots then the bad actor?

Of course. But what does that matter? All you've done is assign blame. The person still had their game experience ruined. With a different design, that might not have been possible. This is like spam protection -- it's not Gmail's fault that you're receiving spam, but they're the ones in a position to stop it.

At a certain point, it becomes more efficient to consider it societies problem.

If bad actors in person went door-to-door attempting to break in by picking locks, would you say that it is purely the responsibility of the homeowner to ensure that their locks are strong enough?

At a "certain point" sure, but I don't think Wordle spoilers rise to the level of "society-level" problems. If we're not at that point with spam email, I can't imagine we're at that point with Wordle spoilers.

If it weren't stored in the JS, the twitter bots could have just played the game quickly and found the answer. Making is slightly more annoying wouldn't deter them.

That'd only apply to today's answer. Now they're able to tweet the answers for the next week.

Don’t you think that a bot could not brute force everyday’s wordle every morning for a tiny amount of processing power? There are solving strategies out there that will solve it with a minimum amount of attempts. So all it would do is add a tiny delay to todays bot being a nuisance.

That’s still slightly different though. If the bots were just for today’s word, and I were the type of person who likes posting my streaks, I could realistically avoid checking twitter until I’ve solved today’s puzzle. If instead the bots are posting future solutions, it’s much harder to avoid having something spoiled.

Agreed but I do think a lot of people project into the future about “what could be a problem” and solve for that. I would guess it’s very common. I’ve seen it done and done it myself. You say to yourself “well if this becomes popular, I won’t want people to know the next word”, which sounds reasonable but it stops things from getting done.

Hence the "actually understanding" part, that's precisely the point. What is, vs what could be.

A hard lesson I've learned for naming things, is that it's almost always better to name something for what it _is_, _right now_, than for what you think it should eventually become.

But if that is the case, then that would not apply to the wordle archive, right?

If the list of words for every day is encoded into a static code, why does the wordle archive need to crawl the site each day, or set the system time to different days, just to get the words for different days... Seems to be a bit over engineered to me...

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