Thank you for navigating to strand.spreen.co I appreciate everyone who got some use out of this archive for the short time it existed. The TL;DR of this post is that the NYT sent me a copyright notice that I will comply with. The website is now shut down. Keep on reading for a bit of a backstory, drama, and some lessons.
I want to take a moment to discuss three things: the developments that I suspect has lead to the NYT shutting this site down, what you might be able to learn from it, and what’s next.
Copy Cats
Only a week after I finished this passion project and made it free for everyone on the internet to use and play, I realized that at least three domains were popping up on Google. All being called something along the lines of new-york-times-strands-archive.to
I was not affiliated with any of them, yet they prominently showed the interface I designed for strand.spreen.co
The interface had the same colors, font, layout, and functionality. It was clear that people downloaded my website’s code and copied it to their website—more on why that’s not just a suspicion later. I did not hold the copyright to the New York Times brand and made sure not to include any words like “New York Times,” “strands,” or even “pangram” on my website. However, I used the same puzzle layout as the times and knew I did not hold the copyright of those puzzles. I have the copyright of my code, website, design, and code files. So, I was taking legal action to take these pages down.
Cloudflare hosted these fraudsters’ domains and firewalls and did not comply with my requests. Letters from real lawyers would’ve cost me money, money for a project that I made for free and that I have never earned a penny on. Reddit and ProductHunt did comply, and I hold them in high regard for doing so. Cloudflare, Hostinger, and Google did not, so they kept the copycats alive.
These pages prominently boast about copying the “new New York Times game Strands,” which boosted their SEO and made these pages easy to find for the Times. I expect that’s why they started to litigate against all of us. That includes pages that stole my code, slapped adult video page style ads on them, probably made thousands of dollars these last few months, and also me. Who built a valuable tool for people to play previous days’ puzzles and didn’t make a dime on it, hosting the whole thing at my own expense.
Lessons
The insulting part is that these people didn’t even spend time ensuring the code worked. The encoding was all wrong, so you didn’t get 1/3 of a hint with every non-theme word, but ÷¿? hints. They didn’t bother coding the part that lets you solve the theme words, either. It just looked like it was working, and that was enough for the copycats. If you tried to solve the puzzle, it did not work. The website was defunct. I ended up encrypting my code, adding symmetric encryption to all the puzzle resource files. I made all of these changes in addition to some improvements and fixes available under an obfuscated web bundle with debugger protection and domain name checks. It is not a perfect solution or enough to deter a skilled web developer. Still, since these people copied code instead of writing it themselves, it was clear that it was good enough to prevent them from copying and improving.
Unfortunately, the lesson here is that offshore developers from third-world countries with no ethics will steal your stuff, even if it’s not making you money. Their stealing will put them at the top of the Google search results, which is bad for your reputation and might result in the entire product space being taken down.
By the way, just before anyone claims they coded the site themselves, the person who bought these domains messaged me on Reddit and admitted to stealing it. He asked me to please reverse the encryption because he needs money and lives in a poor country. The nerve of some people. I told him to learn how to build a reputable and legal business instead and gave him advice on becoming a web developer on Fiverr or something along those lines. I’m not a monster.
What’s Next
I’m an indie developer between projects. That’s why I had time to build strand.spreen.co
I will release something soon. I’ve not decided which project to prioritize, and this demotivating side story has taken some wind out of my sails. If you want to keep up with what I build next, either follow me on Twitter at spreen_co or email me at [email protected]
If you have read this far, I will email you an offline copy of the code for strand.spreen.co if you write in at the above address. It might just give you an idea of how to play old Strands puzzles without my website.
If you want to learn more about my freelance work and might have some work for me, check out my portfolio and freelance work landing page.
I don’t accept donations because I recently immigrated to the U.S. and haven’t figured out the tax situation for this stuff. If you wish to donate to support projects like this, let me know, and I’ll set up a Patreon.
Thank you,
— Nick
Update: I just started a series of building one new app or website every week! You can follow along on TikTok: @spreen_co