Ghost (Owner)

👤 About the Creator – Ghost

🧠 Who is Ghost?

Ghost is the creator of the Shiritori Bot, a long-running word game project hosted on Discord. Known for obsessively building massive wordlists and crafting a mostly functional game system, Ghost has been maintaining and expanding the bot for several years. Originally from El Salvador and currently a third-year high school student based in South Korea, he has a deep passion for computers, language, and words. Ghost has taken computer science courses, including (Computer-Science-Principles), with instruction in Java and Python. He primarily codes in Python and also uses HTML for web-related tasks. His main development tools include Visual Studio Code and , with past experience hosting projects on Glitch. Outside of Shiritori Bot, Ghost briefly experimented with Word Game Hub (hosted on Glitch), but no other public projects are currently known. The bot is supported by a team of dedicated Word curators, who contribute significantly to the community and the growth of the wordlists.

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🔧 How the Bot Was Made

• It all began with a love for the Roblox game Word Bomb, a game Ghost played constantly, even if he wasn’t exactly great at it. What really stuck with him was how limited the word pool felt. Words like were excluded, and that didn’t sit right with someone whose spelling was one of their strongest skills.

• Inspired by the idea of having a bot with a powerful dictionary in-hand, an idea that came from the OMG community, Ghost set out to build something better. The first version of his game was a very rough, Python-powered text-based experiment called Word Bomb Skuffed Edition, which eventually housed around 450,000 words.

• During the bot's development, Ghost also experimented with creating a website full of word games, called Word Game Hub, hosted on Glitch. The site was never finished and only featured one game, which didn’t fully work, but its dictionary reached a peak of 574,000 words, sharing the same dictionary as Super-Shiritori. The discouragement from the incomplete project caused a temporary loss of motivation. The original URL no longer exists, but the website can still be viewed in Live Preview using a link similar to "http://localhost:5500/app/index.html".

• With help from friends and external sources, the project evolved into a website called Ghost-Games, hosted on Glitch. That version eventually went offline, but it laid the foundation for what would become the current Discord bot.

• The bot was built using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and runs with assistance from . Most of its core functionality was learned and developed through trial, error, and countless YouTube tutorials. Ghost doesn’t really like the idea of using AI to write code, calling it “cheat-ish,” but he did use the built-in AI assistant to help draft messages and responses for the bot’s chat output.

• The biggest challenges? Frustration, technical hurdles, and being a broke high schooler with limited resources. Thankfully, a good friend named Kos now helps run the bot, keeping things online and stable. :3

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🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Partnerships & Collaborators

• Kos (kos256) – Bot Administrator

• GreenyMage (greenymage) – Graphic Designer

• Beyond that, the project thrives thanks to the small but loyal community that has formed around it. Whether you're actively contributing or just hanging out in the server, Ghost truly appreciates every one of you. This project wouldn’t exist without that support.

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✨ Fun Facts

• Has strong knowledge of geography.
• Some accent-based word translations happen automatically due to the global `Normalize` function; at first, people thought it was intentional.
• Many "false words" are created by Ghost as inside jokes; examples can be found in the Word Compendium under Shiritori originals.
• Admin Kos often calls Ghost by the nickname “Shiritori.”
• Has developed a recent phobia of grapes, after October 11th 2025.