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Wordle Now Redirects to NYT
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
Changed font, added hamburger menu, as well as tracking of course.
- cuteboy19 5y agoThey broke the PWA :/
- m00n 5y agoAnd they broke everybody’s streak in the process while reusing today‘s word… Way to destroy a good brand.
- czzr 5y agoDidn’t break my streak.
- js2 5y agoIt 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.
- jamesakirk 5y agoI'm running Chrome on Win10 and my records survived the migration, so your mileage may vary.
- tuankiet65 5y agoApparently 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.
- krrishd 5y agoAh, I was wondering how it persisted the stats (which I presumed were stored via localStorage).
- jdorsey1 5y agoThis is clearly a violation of privacy because the url is unencrypted. NYT may face a billionaire lawsuit and his future is compromised.
- avl999 5y agoThe url is encrypted, the entire thing is over tls.
- jrochkind1 5y agoI 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!
- oh_sigh 5y agoAlso 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.example.com/phishNYT https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/?url=https://www.exam... "
- g_p 5y agoSeems like hopefully an easy and obvious fix - no need for a fully open redirect here!
- pickledish 5y agoAh! 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)
- m00n 5y agoThe statistics worked for me too, just the streak was reset.
- xeromal 5y agoStretch to call it a brand. haha
- omnicognate 5y agoIt's a brand the nyt considered worth 7 figures.
- spockz 5y agoInteresting. 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?
- genewitch 5y agoColored boxes that you can paste anywhere that supports emoji/whatever that show your final game state. Sometimes it really is that simple.
- warning26 5y agoIt persisted my streak -- not sure why yours didn't transfer. I did see the onboarding page again.
- BillSaysThis 5y agoLost my streak :rage:
- slibhb 5y agoDitto. 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))
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt redirects on my Mac, but not on my iPhone, which still shows the old version, and I can't figure out why.
- jedberg 5y agoSame here, which is fine because I play on my phone anyway.
- omnicognate 5y agoI initially thought it was continuing to show the old one on my phone but I just needed to refresh...
- hyencomper 5y agoIt did not redirect me on Edge. I'm in Singapore, so maybe that's why.
- axutio 5y agoI've been playing Wordle as a saved PWA on iOS, wonder how the transfer will work for that.
- mroche 5y agoI 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.
- _bramses 5y ago"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/1488582834507845633 https://twitter.com/quepaso_daniel/status/148858283450784563...
- omnicognate 5y agoI've not seen a single comment criticising the dev for it. I'm pretty annoyed with the nyt though.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoWhy? They bought it, they can do whatever they want with it.
- shadowfacts 5y agoThey /can/ do whatever they want, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
- thawaya3113 5y agoExcept they have done nothing other than move it from his personal URL to their own.
- omnicognate 5y agoAnd 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").
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
- msoad 5y agoThey 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
- queuebert 5y agoSurely 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?
- dpark 5y ago> 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.
- nverno 5y agoIt's entertainment, for the most part, and always has been. Crosswords have been popular in the NYT forever.
- capeterson 5y agoI'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.
- motoxpro 5y agoWhat 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.
- heyheyhey 5y agoDisappointed it still releases at 12am for your timezone. Hate this system.
- micromacrofoot 5y agocare to elaborate?
- heyheyhey 5y agoThe 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.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoohhh, that makes sense - thank you!
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoSend a different timezone to the server?
- wccrawford 5y agoThat 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.
- gnicholas 5y agoI'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 https://metzger.media/games/wordle-archive
- g_p 5y agoRejecting 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.
- staindk 5y agoAha, the most "innocent" of dark patterns.
- sushid 5y agoHow did Wordle track your progress and stats before? localStorage? I feel like this change is very subtle and very user friendly for an acquisition.
- snypher 5y agoIt 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'.
- Jcampuzano2 5y agoIt was all in localstorage, yeah. You can still see a lot of it in localstorage, albeit with a bit more things there than before.
- g_p 5y agoIt still uses localStorage - see the key "nyt-wordle-state" in the new site.
- warrenm 5y agoI t had to be individual browser cookies - because I could redo the puzzle in multiple browsers on the same device all with different histories
- civilized 5y agoI'm sure one talented programmer could code up OpenWordle and put it on GitHub in a few days tops
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoThere are hundreds on GitHub already. It’s the new Fizzbuzz.
- quocanh 5y agoI know what my next interview question is gonna be.
- quickthrower2 5y agoIs there a blockchain version yet? I am tempted to code one up.
- pklausler 5y agoPour 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.
- ejstronge 5y agoI 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.
- cool_dude85 5y agoI mean, not directly, but ultimately they are, right? The guy in charge of the paper?
- anthk 5y agoYou can write your own clone with grep, sh and /usr/share/dict/words.
- jjnoakes 5y agoThis 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.
- Something1234 5y agoI mean maybe if we used shuf with the same seed value for everyone it would work.
- jjnoakes 5y agoIf 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...
- anthk 5y agohttps://gist.github.com/huytd/6a1a6a7b34a0d0abcac00b47e3d01513 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pseudalopex 5y agoYou can write your own Dropbox clone with curlftpfs too![1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- 5y ago
- jimbursch1 5y agoWhat is NYT going to gain from this purchase? Or, what am I giving to NYT when I play this game over coffee every morning?
- paxys 5y agoYou are going to their website, and they will soon start upselling you their games subscription.
- jimbursch1 5y agoSo essentially it’s a marketing play?
- henryfjordan 5y agoJust 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.
- jimbursch1 5y agoIs hedge the right term, as in hedging a bet? Or are they reinforcing their dominant position?
- henryfjordan 5y agoI 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.
- mike_d 5y agoNew 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.
- dlmiddlecote 5y agoDid wordle always have a “Hard Mode”?
- gnicholas 5y agoI can't speak to "always", but it's been there ever since it became popular about a month ago.
- drexlspivey 5y agoExcellent 3b1b video about trying to solve wordle using information theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA
- gnicholas 5y agoVery 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.
- greenyoda 5y agoSome HN discussion of that video a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30232413 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-wordle https://aperiodical.com/2022/02/a-mathematicians-guide-to-wo...
- theginger 5y agoI 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.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoOoh, if you posted your results to your social media then previous stats could be PII??
- gnicholas 5y agoIs 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?
- jffry 5y agoAt 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 https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
- Kylekramer 5y agoSo 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.
- throwaway81523 5y agoWait, 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.
- exdsq 5y ago
- loeg 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30294688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30294688
- banana_giraffe 5y agoThey'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?
- spoonjim 5y agoI’ve always found that the Wordle solution word is very common. So agora and pupal would be surprising in that regard.
- jker 5y agoMaybe they’re agora-phobic.
- jffry 5y ago> 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?
- zucker42 5y agoI would guess they just got removed because they were obscure. I remember past words with repeated letters.
- senectus1 5y agohuh evidently I've been playing the wrong one with my friends: https://wordle.nyc/ https://wordle.nyc/
- ents 5y agoThat seems to be a clone of OG Wordle
- charcircuit 5y agoIt's a pirated version of it.
- blunte 5y agoThey 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.
- leros 5y agoI 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.
- acdha 5y agoI 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?”)
- leros 5y agoThat'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.
- acdha 5y agoYeah, 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.
- throwaway81523 5y agoI 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.
- joek1301 5y agoThe 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 https://reichel.dev/blog/reverse-engineering-wordle.html
- dankwizard 5y agoIt 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.
- throwaway81523 5y agoAh 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.
- throwaway81523 5y agoPosting this in case anyone is interested, and for my own future reference: https://hackaday.com/2022/02/08/wordle-reverse-engineering-and-automated-solving/ https://hackaday.com/2022/02/08/wordle-reverse-engineering-a...
- u2077 5y agoIs 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.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y agoWayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20220201003547/https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220201003547/https://www.power...
- rossy 5y agoEven 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.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220201003547id_/https://www.po...
- hddqsb 5y agoGreat 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#identity-modifier-id https://pywb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manual/rewriter.html#i...)
- sodality2 5y agoI simply downloaded the HTML and rehosted it on my site: https://matthew.science/wordle.html https://matthew.science/wordle.html
- nunez 5y agoCrazy 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.
- Jamie9912 5y agoDoes anyone have the original wordle somewhere? I would like to play that one instead
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y agoLooks like the wayback machine has multiple copies per day
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ece 5y agoSaw this before 4pm today and entered the word I solved at 4:30pm yesterday. Solved in 1. :)
- not2b 5y agoNot 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.
- ece 5y agoIt 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.
- johnnyo 5y agoBonus. I solved todays already, so with the redirect I was able to solve it in 1
- greatjack613 5y ago
- jrochkind1 5y agoi just get name-squatting spam there.
- jrochkind1 5y agoi'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/ 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?
- altairprime 5y agoI was seeing that yesterday, but I hit refresh this morning and got migrated to the NYT site, with my stats persisted across the migration.
- jrochkind1 5y agoI 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.
- alex-chew 5y agoI'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 https://wrd.li (The order of the solutions is different than the original, and is randomized each day.)
- iKlsR 5y agoLove it, my girlfriend and I are on puzzle 8 now, thank you. Add a tip jar.
- HmOh6WbJ 5y agoHonest q: could you get sued for that? Likely at least a cease and desist, right?
- TingPing 5y agoSure you always can. Will it be ruled against them? Its a pretty trivial and not unique site/game.
- quickthrower2 5y agoCopyright? Patent? Registered design?
- scambier 5y agoThere 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/ https://rwmpelstilzchen.gitlab.io/wordles/
- mfkp 5y agoPretty nice implementation, but it's missing the best feature: social sharing
- alex-chew 5y agoYou'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.
- jmu1234567890 5y agoHow did they maintain the streaks? I thought that was in local storage
- xboxnolifes 5y agoThe redirect sent query parameters with the information
- braggle 5y agoA Wordle clone with allowed Scrabble words and different word lengths: https://braggle.xyz https://braggle.xyz
- TedShiller 5y agoRemember 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.
- srmarm 5y agoThere's not caring about making £50/month from some AdSense code Vs not caring about a £xM payoff. I'll allow them this one.
- TedShiller 5y agoFrom 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?
- keith_erskine 5y agoWhat's the over-under on when they put pop-up ads in the game?
- warrenm 5y agoNot for me as of 70 seconds ago
- gabrielsroka 5y agoThe 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.
- gabrielsroka 5y agoLooks like someone beat me to it. https://boingboing.net/2022/02/11/pussy-pupal-and-agora-among-words-removed-from-wordle-after-move-to-new-york-times.html https://boingboing.net/2022/02/11/pussy-pupal-and-agora-amon...
- sydthrowaway 5y agoWhat the hell is wordle