Thread by @beesolved

Since some of you are asking about the weirdnes in the Bee this morning, here is my diagnosis. Let me put a big caveat up front by reminding everyone that I do not work for or with the @nytimes. I have no firsthand knowledge of their puzzle operations. /1

What I do have is more than a quarter-century of experience as a web developer, forty years of general programming experience, and three and half years experience analyzing and reporting on Spelling Bee itself. Okay, that said... /2

...here's what I think is happening. If you have an account with @NYTGames, then all the games you play are being tracked in a big database connected to the Times's web servers. This lets you change devices in the middle of the day and pick up the Bee from where you left off. /3

There is some kind of internal ID -- a number, a string of alphanumeric characters, a GUID, whatever -- that identifies the current day's puzzle. When you come back to the Bee, the game looks up that ID in your account in the database to see if you have a puzzle in progress. /4

If so, the game loads your puzzle with some or all of the answers already entered. If not, then you start the puzzle fresh. With me so far? /5

Now, today's puzzle used the same exact letter set as the puzzle from July 12, 2020. That would not normally be a problem as long as today's puzzle is using a different internal ID from the one used back then. /6 spll.be/796

The same situation has occurred numerous times in the past without resulting in "ghost" puzzles like the one many of us have seen today. /7

However, my speculation is that today, when the same set of letters was used, someone forgot to also change the internal ID used to identify this puzzle as April 11, 2022 instead of July 12, 2020. /8

The result is that the game reloads the results from July 12, 2020 for anyone who actually played it on that date. It picks up right where you left off 638 days ago! If you made Queen Bee, game over. If you weren't there yet, you can continue playing until you finish. /9

Having made big, visible errors like this of my own in the past, I can report that it's an easy thing to do. Go easy on @NYTGames! I would not want to be them today. The good thing is, lives did not hang in the balance. And @thegridkid promises a new puzzle soon. /10

Again, this is just my long-distance analysis, but I can't think of a better explanation. Bee well, #hivemind! We'll all get through this! /end

P.S. I used the term GUID earlier in this thread, which is a little technical. I meant to attach this explanatory link. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal…