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A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

nytimes.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

#12
I'm surprised the NYT still uses a big randomized word list that was decided upon 'last year'. Why not pick Wordle words, say, one week out? It's not a ton of a work: probably less work over the course of a year than writing a single apology letter for an accidental collision that it would have prevented.

Re: A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

#14

Sooo, “fetus” is a word dangerous enough that it requires a 350 word explainer article to accompany it?

I am surprised that they are not stating the word explicitly, only vaguely as "closely connected to a major recent news event" ("He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" comes to mind as an association) Edit: the wording was updated to be more constructive

They’re trying not to spoil the puzzle?

Re: A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

#15
post #2

In case there's a paywall for the editor's note: the tl;dr is that today's word was originally supposed to be "FETUS". Last week the NYT noticed this and made a change, but this change wouldn't propagate to all the Wordle players who still have the cached word list in their browsers. Full text below: It’s been just over three months since The New York Times acquired Wordle, the hugely popular puzzle created by Josh W…

"current Wordle technology" is one of the things that made it so great -- it was /is client-side.

I understand that NYT didn't want to step in it, and it was probably a smart decision, but I'd love to live in a world where the editor chose to say, "Well, we defined that word list many months ago and it happened to come up today. The public reaction to today's Wordle simply emphasizes the fact that words, even a single word, matter."

Re: A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

#17

The source code seemed extremely simple, but somehow they messed it up so it’s impossible for them to change a word in time. Am I understanding this correctly?

My reading is that changing the word in the source code is really easy, but getting everyone's browsers to use the new version instead of their old cached one is difficult.

Re: A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised that they are not stating the word explicitly, only vaguely as "closely connected to a major recent news event" ("He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" comes to mind as an association) Edit: the wording was updated to be more constructive

They’re trying not to spoil the puzzle?

That'd be a reason to not mention the replacement word, but they could have mentioned the one they removed.
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