7 ms·

NYT shutting down the Wordle archive

113 points by dtagames 5y ago

nojito 5y ago
I mean NYT Games' strategy is to put game archives behind a subscription. See here for crosswords: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051947672-New-York-Times-Crossword-Archive https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051947672-New-... Doubt they will ever go after un-named clones though.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  They might go after the trademark
  - donohoe 5y ago
    Unfortunately I think they have little choice. If you don't enforce a trademark then you risk losing it.
    - bin_bash 5y ago
      People say this a lot but there aren’t many examples of this actually happening in legal matters. The bigger risk is losing the trademark inside of people’s minds—which would have to happen first anyways. Similar to Velcro, which still legally has the trademark but to the public it’s genericized.
      - donohoe 5y ago
        My understanding is that it happens enough that lawyers worry enough about it and therefore chase these things down constantly. Over the years I have received cease-and desists from nice lawyers for Virgin Atlantic, The Coke-Cola Company (I had a Chrome extension called "Facebook Classic" that restored the reverse-chronological feed when FB started moving away from that), and an unofficial polite pre-lawyer request from The New York Times.
charcircuit 5y ago
Wordle is not open source. You do not have a license to redistribute it.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  The gameplay rules of Wordle are not patented or protected. Anyone can make a clone with the same rules, just don't call it Wordle or use trademarked/copyrighted names associated with it. See more here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cd3b3bbc-03d8-47e1-b8cc-abb2cd48fff3 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cd3b3bbc-03d8...
  - mtmail 5y ago
    Or literally copy the code. There was a Show HN for https://opensourcewordle.com/ https://opensourcewordle.com/ (no longer works, [edit: found it] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185004) that took the obfuscated Javascript, replaced the URL, changed the license and repackaged it. When called out in the comments the author doubled down and insisted they emailed the original author and NYT. Anyway, a week later the website stopped working, github repository deleted, and (surprisingly, very rare and must have needed moderator manual action) the HN username changed from first-namelast to something random.
- OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
  I didn't see any mention of license back when it wasn't bought yet, what license did it used to be under before NYT?
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    There is no license which allows you redistribution. Default in copyright. A license is needed tongtant you tights. (fair use etc. exists of course)
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    It didn't have one, which means nobody had rights except the creator.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Someone1234 5y ago
See this previous HN thread for how difficult NYT makes it to cancel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 This is the kind of dark-pattern/anti-consumer stuff you should expect if you must keep using Wordle-branded Wordle (as opposed to one of their competitors).
- gumby 5y ago
  …unless you live in California. In some ways this is a minor issue, but it would be best for everyone, including subscription service providers, if this kind of thing were banned by law.
  - 18lwoodward 5y ago
- teaearlgraycold 5y ago
  I use privacy.com (single use/purpose card number generator) for my NYT subscription because of that part.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    They don't cancel your subscription when your credit card number stops working. They keep charging you, and send the account balance to a collections agency. So hopefully you signed up with a fake name and fake address.
    - dymk 5y ago
      And if you did use a fake name and address, you're now committing credit card fraud, so have fun with that.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Credit card fraud can be fun.
blamazon 5y ago
Can we just admire for a moment that the person who made Wordle is named Josh Wardle. That's amazing. (That a side project punnily named after his last name became such a phenomenon)
- progman32 5y ago
  What's next in the world of software naming, an entire OS named after the author? What are the odds? :-) Aside: bring back credit screens in software!
- jachee 5y ago
  Yeah, he named it after himself. It’s really not a coincidence. :)
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    I think it’s more about the fact that a dude who loves words and is a great programmer made this great word game, and happened to be conveniently named Wardle, in order for this nice little pun on his name to incur…
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  And Lou Gehrig got Lou Gehrig's disease, what are the chances?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Can we just admire for a moment that the person who made Wordle is named Josh Wardle. That's amazing. The southernmost bridge in NYC and New York State is Outerbridge Crossing (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing>). Read up on how it was named.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I’m not a Wordle player so I was confused about why they’d shut down the archive part of their acquisition. Reading closer, the “Wordle Archive” was a Wordle clone site that allowed people to play old Wordles. No surprise that they’d be asking clone sites, especially those using both the trademark and exact content, to shut down. You can’t expect to clone Wordle, call it Wordle, use the Wordle words, and expect the Wordle owners to look the other way. This seems like a non-story.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I think it's fine to have "dog bites man" stories. NYT paying money for a property and aggressively trying to defend is totally expected, but still a story worth conveying.
  - cush 5y ago
    A small indie dev got $1M+ for the name “Wordle” and NYT wants to own the brand. It’s not “dog bites man”… it’s a complete non-story.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      It's not news but it can still be a story. This is the kind of decision editors make, this is part of what people mean when they talk about editorial stance. A publication whose only editorial goal is to give you novel information would not report "orphan crushing machine crushes 80 orphans, as it has every day since it was activated" since you probably already know about that. OTOH people are hitting adulthood every day never having heard of the orphan crushing machine, and you want to give them a chance to say "excuse me the what??" "System working as intended" isn't new information, but making people consider the effects of that intention can be valuable. We might in fact want it to work a different way if we think about it for a bit.
      - cush 5y ago
        You got hyper fixated on my use of the word _story_ and completely missed my actual point. NYT bought "Wordle" from an indie dev for $1M+. The article complains about the fact they're protecting their newly-bought and very expensive IP. The orphan-crushing analogy is a strawman, because Josh Wardle wouldn't have been incentivized to protect the IP. The incentive to protect "Wordle" happened when $1M+ was exchanged and has nothing to do with NYT as a company. Any company or person would do the same.
Ansil849 5y ago
The NYT has put a shitton of advertising trackers on their Wordle site [1], has censored words from the original word list [2], and now this. These kinds of user-hostile actions are exactly why I will never support them. [1] https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-times-1848554549 https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/wordle-bans-slave-new-york-times-offensive-words-banned-removed-1679793 https://www.newsweek.com/wordle-bans-slave-new-york-times-of...
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience. Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher. This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    > What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience. If you don't see how removing words off the wordlist impacts the experience, I really can't explain it to you, it's a tautology: removing words impacts the experience precisely by removing words. Because you can no longer use the removed word in gameplay, as you could previously. Therefore experience is impacted. > Adding trackers is the expected move It being 'expected' has no bearing on it not being palatable and being user hostile.
    - paulcole 5y ago
      > Therefore experience is impacted This is like saying stubbing your toe on a grain of sand impacts the experience of your foot. Yes, you are technically correct that the Wordle experience has changed, but it hasn’t changed in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way for 99.9% of Wordle players.
      - Ansil849 5y ago
topynate 5y ago
Does anyone know of a wordle that's in sync with the NYT's list of answers but uses the original dictionary? The NYT site doesn't work for me with uBO turned on (actually it barely works with it turned off). (Edit: I think I answered my own question: https://www.wordel.app https://www.wordel.app. Author at https://twitter.com/m_yxnk/status/1498171177763803140 https://twitter.com/m_yxnk/status/1498171177763803140)
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  Wordel seems completely nonfunctional on iOS chrome. Can’t type anything in..
- andrewmcm 5y ago
  I also found https://www.wordlearchive.com https://www.wordlearchive.com and it seems it's using the original words as well
- AnonC 5y ago
  From what I’ve seen over the slab of a few days in the past when NYT acquired the Wordle site, the word list has been changed in the current NYT game by removing/replacing (because NYT thought those are difficult) and reordering some words. At the time NYT acquired the Wordle site, clones of the site without any changes came up. One of them is wordle.nyc. Since the original Wordle was completely self contained on the front end, you could just save the clone site locally (with the HTML, CSS and JS) and play it on a browser.
jstx1 5y ago
Enjoy while it lasts - https://www.devangthakkar.com/wordle_archive/ https://www.devangthakkar.com/wordle_archive/ There's a part of me that wants to spin up a new clone of this on a regular basis purely out of spite.
- cush 5y ago
  Anyone can create a clone as long as it’s not called Wordle.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    How does that work if all these things already existed before the acquisition? Clearly nobody cared about protecting the name before. The whole reason Wordle is so popular is because all the stuff around it.
    - pests 5y ago
      Clearly, but then owners change, and different owners have different priorities.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - justusthane 5y ago
      I really don't think so—Wordle is popular because of the network effect of posting scores on Twitter. All of the other stuff (the Wordle archive, Worldle, Absurdle, etc) is popular _because_ of Wordle.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Wordle existed for 5 minutes before NYT bought it (it's still only been around for 5 minutes, really.) It isn't surprising that Wardle didn't put together a legal department. Just don't call it Wordle if you want to clone it. It's nearly the guy's actual name, maybe cut him a little slack.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
datavirtue 5y ago
What's Wordle?
- tim333 5y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wordle https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wordle story about the dev https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...
- 18lwoodward 5y ago
joshspankit 5y ago
This (free-market-limiting acquisitions) is why we can’t have nice things
- 18lwoodward 5y ago
18lwoodward 5y ago
18lwoodward 5y ago
- 18lwoodward 5y ago

113 points by dtagames 5y ago

I mean NYT Games' strategy is to put game archives behind a subscription. See here for crosswords: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051947672-New-York-Times-Crossword-Archive https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051947672-New-... Doubt they will ever go after un-named clones though.

bin_bash 5y ago
They might go after the trademark
- donohoe 5y ago
  Unfortunately I think they have little choice. If you don't enforce a trademark then you risk losing it.
  - bin_bash 5y ago
    People say this a lot but there aren’t many examples of this actually happening in legal matters. The bigger risk is losing the trademark inside of people’s minds—which would have to happen first anyways. Similar to Velcro, which still legally has the trademark but to the public it’s genericized.
    - donohoe 5y ago
      My understanding is that it happens enough that lawyers worry enough about it and therefore chase these things down constantly. Over the years I have received cease-and desists from nice lawyers for Virgin Atlantic, The Coke-Cola Company (I had a Chrome extension called "Facebook Classic" that restored the reverse-chronological feed when FB started moving away from that), and an unofficial polite pre-lawyer request from The New York Times.

charcircuit 5y ago

Wordle is not open source. You do not have a license to redistribute it.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
The gameplay rules of Wordle are not patented or protected. Anyone can make a clone with the same rules, just don't call it Wordle or use trademarked/copyrighted names associated with it. See more here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cd3b3bbc-03d8-47e1-b8cc-abb2cd48fff3 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cd3b3bbc-03d8...
- mtmail 5y ago
  Or literally copy the code. There was a Show HN for https://opensourcewordle.com/ https://opensourcewordle.com/ (no longer works, [edit: found it] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185004) that took the obfuscated Javascript, replaced the URL, changed the license and repackaged it. When called out in the comments the author doubled down and insisted they emailed the original author and NYT. Anyway, a week later the website stopped working, github repository deleted, and (surprisingly, very rare and must have needed moderator manual action) the HN username changed from first-namelast to something random.
OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
I didn't see any mention of license back when it wasn't bought yet, what license did it used to be under before NYT?
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  There is no license which allows you redistribution. Default in copyright. A license is needed tongtant you tights. (fair use etc. exists of course)
- wccrawford 5y ago
  It didn't have one, which means nobody had rights except the creator.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Someone1234 5y ago

See this previous HN thread for how difficult NYT makes it to cancel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 This is the kind of dark-pattern/anti-consumer stuff you should expect if you must keep using Wordle-branded Wordle (as opposed to one of their competitors).

gumby 5y ago
…unless you live in California. In some ways this is a minor issue, but it would be best for everyone, including subscription service providers, if this kind of thing were banned by law.
- 18lwoodward 5y ago
teaearlgraycold 5y ago
I use privacy.com (single use/purpose card number generator) for my NYT subscription because of that part.
- jrockway 5y ago
  They don't cancel your subscription when your credit card number stops working. They keep charging you, and send the account balance to a collections agency. So hopefully you signed up with a fake name and fake address.
  - dymk 5y ago
    And if you did use a fake name and address, you're now committing credit card fraud, so have fun with that.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Credit card fraud can be fun.

blamazon 5y ago

Can we just admire for a moment that the person who made Wordle is named Josh Wardle. That's amazing. (That a side project punnily named after his last name became such a phenomenon)

progman32 5y ago
What's next in the world of software naming, an entire OS named after the author? What are the odds? :-) Aside: bring back credit screens in software!
jachee 5y ago
Yeah, he named it after himself. It’s really not a coincidence. :)
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  I think it’s more about the fact that a dude who loves words and is a great programmer made this great word game, and happened to be conveniently named Wardle, in order for this nice little pun on his name to incur…
booleandilemma 5y ago
And Lou Gehrig got Lou Gehrig's disease, what are the chances?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TMWNN 5y ago
>Can we just admire for a moment that the person who made Wordle is named Josh Wardle. That's amazing. The southernmost bridge in NYC and New York State is Outerbridge Crossing (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing>). Read up on how it was named.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I’m not a Wordle player so I was confused about why they’d shut down the archive part of their acquisition. Reading closer, the “Wordle Archive” was a Wordle clone site that allowed people to play old Wordles. No surprise that they’d be asking clone sites, especially those using both the trademark and exact content, to shut down. You can’t expect to clone Wordle, call it Wordle, use the Wordle words, and expect the Wordle owners to look the other way. This seems like a non-story.

makeitdouble 5y ago
I think it's fine to have "dog bites man" stories. NYT paying money for a property and aggressively trying to defend is totally expected, but still a story worth conveying.
- cush 5y ago
  A small indie dev got $1M+ for the name “Wordle” and NYT wants to own the brand. It’s not “dog bites man”… it’s a complete non-story.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    It's not news but it can still be a story. This is the kind of decision editors make, this is part of what people mean when they talk about editorial stance. A publication whose only editorial goal is to give you novel information would not report "orphan crushing machine crushes 80 orphans, as it has every day since it was activated" since you probably already know about that. OTOH people are hitting adulthood every day never having heard of the orphan crushing machine, and you want to give them a chance to say "excuse me the what??" "System working as intended" isn't new information, but making people consider the effects of that intention can be valuable. We might in fact want it to work a different way if we think about it for a bit.
    - cush 5y ago
      You got hyper fixated on my use of the word _story_ and completely missed my actual point. NYT bought "Wordle" from an indie dev for $1M+. The article complains about the fact they're protecting their newly-bought and very expensive IP. The orphan-crushing analogy is a strawman, because Josh Wardle wouldn't have been incentivized to protect the IP. The incentive to protect "Wordle" happened when $1M+ was exchanged and has nothing to do with NYT as a company. Any company or person would do the same.

Ansil849 5y ago

The NYT has put a shitton of advertising trackers on their Wordle site [1], has censored words from the original word list [2], and now this. These kinds of user-hostile actions are exactly why I will never support them. [1] https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-times-1848554549 https://gizmodo.com/wordle-ad-trackers-privacy-new-york-time... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/wordle-bans-slave-new-york-times-offensive-words-banned-removed-1679793 https://www.newsweek.com/wordle-bans-slave-new-york-times-of...

johannes1234321 5y ago
What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience. Adding trackers is the expected move, when going from a hobby site to a publisher. This is something which has to be fixed systematically by proper legislation.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  > What's user hostile in taking words off the list? I don't really see how that impacts the experience. If you don't see how removing words off the wordlist impacts the experience, I really can't explain it to you, it's a tautology: removing words impacts the experience precisely by removing words. Because you can no longer use the removed word in gameplay, as you could previously. Therefore experience is impacted. > Adding trackers is the expected move It being 'expected' has no bearing on it not being palatable and being user hostile.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    > Therefore experience is impacted This is like saying stubbing your toe on a grain of sand impacts the experience of your foot. Yes, you are technically correct that the Wordle experience has changed, but it hasn’t changed in a meaningful (or even noticeable) way for 99.9% of Wordle players.
    - Ansil849 5y ago

topynate 5y ago

Does anyone know of a wordle that's in sync with the NYT's list of answers but uses the original dictionary? The NYT site doesn't work for me with uBO turned on (actually it barely works with it turned off). (Edit: I think I answered my own question: https://www.wordel.app https://www.wordel.app. Author at https://twitter.com/m_yxnk/status/1498171177763803140 https://twitter.com/m_yxnk/status/1498171177763803140)

indigodaddy 5y ago
Wordel seems completely nonfunctional on iOS chrome. Can’t type anything in..
andrewmcm 5y ago
I also found https://www.wordlearchive.com https://www.wordlearchive.com and it seems it's using the original words as well
AnonC 5y ago
From what I’ve seen over the slab of a few days in the past when NYT acquired the Wordle site, the word list has been changed in the current NYT game by removing/replacing (because NYT thought those are difficult) and reordering some words. At the time NYT acquired the Wordle site, clones of the site without any changes came up. One of them is wordle.nyc. Since the original Wordle was completely self contained on the front end, you could just save the clone site locally (with the HTML, CSS and JS) and play it on a browser.

jstx1 5y ago

Enjoy while it lasts - https://www.devangthakkar.com/wordle_archive/ https://www.devangthakkar.com/wordle_archive/ There's a part of me that wants to spin up a new clone of this on a regular basis purely out of spite.

cush 5y ago
Anyone can create a clone as long as it’s not called Wordle.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  How does that work if all these things already existed before the acquisition? Clearly nobody cared about protecting the name before. The whole reason Wordle is so popular is because all the stuff around it.
  - pests 5y ago
    Clearly, but then owners change, and different owners have different priorities.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - justusthane 5y ago
    I really don't think so—Wordle is popular because of the network effect of posting scores on Twitter. All of the other stuff (the Wordle archive, Worldle, Absurdle, etc) is popular _because_ of Wordle.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Wordle existed for 5 minutes before NYT bought it (it's still only been around for 5 minutes, really.) It isn't surprising that Wardle didn't put together a legal department. Just don't call it Wordle if you want to clone it. It's nearly the guy's actual name, maybe cut him a little slack.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

datavirtue 5y ago

What's Wordle?

tim333 5y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wordle https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wordle story about the dev https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...
18lwoodward 5y ago

joshspankit 5y ago

This (free-market-limiting acquisitions) is why we can’t have nice things

18lwoodward 5y ago

18lwoodward 5y ago

18lwoodward 5y ago