Gone are the days of storing your Wordle history precariously in your browser cache: you need a free New York Times account to view your history.

I know this because I have never connected my Wordle history to my account. From the beginning, my Wordle history was tied to my work Chrome profile. (Don't make me explain why it's a work profile.)

However, when I finished solving today's Wordle (the 1000th Wordle puzzle), the bar graph of the guess distribution that I had seen for years was gone. In its place was an invitation to create a free New York Times account to see my stats; the NYT purchased Wordle in 2022 from its creator Josh Wardle. (In his 2022 GDC talk, Wardle attributed Wordle's success in part to the fact that players shared their results on social media, not that he actually invented the idea. This sharing nature, along with the fact that it was free and required no account creation, led to Wordle's viral spread. (Fun fact: the first explosion was in New Zealand.)

Wordle can still be played without an account, but if you want to read out your stats, it is mandatory to create a New York Times account.

The New York Times may be more serious about turning Wordle's enduring popularity into revenue.