ru-catfishing

A small daily web game: guess the Russian Wikipedia article from its categories. 10 puzzles a day, shareable result (Wordle-style), zero login.

Inspired by catfishing: original concept by Sumana Harihareswara; name and original implementation by Kevan Davis (2006); the modern daily game at catfishing.net is made by an anonymous developer, Matthew. This is an independent Russian-language build.

🐟 Live: https://imangulova.github.io/ru-catfishing/

Structure

• app/ — the production game: SvelteKit + adapter-static, deployed to GitHub Pages via Actions. Strict privacy: ships only categories + hashed accepted answers + base64-obfuscated reveal (no plaintext answers in client).
• prototype/ — v0 single-file HTML prototype (kept for reference).
• scripts/ — Python helpers:
  • build_pool.py — fetch RU featured/good articles, filter categories, hash.
  • make_day.py — turn a curated day into the strict client data format.
• research/ — notes on games we learn from (catfishing.md).
• BACKLOG.md — epics and progress.

Run the app locally

cd app
npm install
npm run dev      # dev server
npm run build    # static build -> app/build/

Deploy

Push to main → GitHub Actions builds app/ and deploys to Pages (.github/workflows/deploy.yml). Pages Source must be set to GitHub Actions. BASE_PATH is derived from the repo name automatically.

North star

Daily puzzle + tiny shareable result + zero login. Cheap to host (static site on GitHub Pages).

Attribution

• Original concept: Sumana Harihareswara.
• Name and original implementation: Kevan Davis (2006).
• The modern daily game (catfishing.net): an anonymous developer, Matthew.
• This project (ru-catfishing) is an independent Russian-language build.
• Data: ru.wikipedia category data, GFDL.