Twitter has banned a bot that was trying to spoil the viral game Wordle by tweeting out the next day's secret word.
The popular online game refreshes once a day, with millions of players around the world all trying to guess the same answer.
After software engineer Robert Reichel reverse-engineered the game earlier this month he was able to accurately predict the next day's word.
That information was enough for someone who apparently decided they were sick of seeing Wordle references in their timeline to create the Wordlinator on Twitter.
The bot's account announced it was "sent from the future to terminate Wordle bragging" and replied to those sharing their results with an insult and the next day's answer.
Responses along the lines of: "Guess what. People don't care about your mediocre linguistic escapades. To teach you a lesson, tomorrow's word is *****," were typical.
On his blog revealing how he figured out which word would be next, Reichel said he was "curious how the game worked" so decided to pick apart the source code and see what it was doing.
He quickly found out that there were no web requests involved when playing the game and thus the words were all stored client-side. By looking at the site's source code he was then able to find all 2315 words currently stored in the game's word list.
He concluded the secret word was chosen each day from that word list and followed the various functions until he found out how it was picked.
"At this point, we've done enough digging to know how Wordle is choosing the word of the day," Reichel wrote.
"We know that Wordle uses a client-side date-based algorithm to determine which word to use from a static wordlist.
"Each day is predictable so long as we have all of the code pieced together," he concluded.
After using that information to spoil the game for Twitter users, the platform banned the Wordlinator account.
While it hasn't confirmed why it was banned, Twitter's automation rules say bots shouldn't "spam or bother users, or otherwise send them unsolicited messages".
Anyone who doesn't want to see Wordle results on their timeline has an alternative to creating bots to spoil the game for millions of people - Twitter has a word mute function which will filter out all tweets with a specified word.
