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I've never attempted making this kind of puzzle before and I'm not sure the types of reactions I'm gonna get... so please be nice and leave constructive criticism! — Voldemort's Wrath, Aug 17 '20 at 22:30

score 35 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 18 '20 at 07:50

35

The question body contains a sequence of

\u200b and \u200c characters repeated five times.

Mapping them to 1 and 0 respectively, we get

[0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]

Treating these as ASCII bits, this becomes the string:
Ah! You've figured me out!

edited Aug 18 '20 at 07:50

Tonks

550
3
15

answered Aug 17 '20 at 22:39

Doorknob

4,657
5
35
50

1

Well... 8 minutes! – Voldemort's Wrath Aug 17 '20 at 22:39
1

@Voldemort'sWrath Obviously these are outputs of some (probably Python) program. This is also what I would have done... so I'd say 8 minutes is a reasonable time. Nice puzzle! – WhatsUp Aug 18 '20 at 02:37
1

Long time no see ... – Rand al'Thor Aug 18 '20 at 11:23
1

How did you get the first part? – Sagar Chand Aug 18 '20 at 11:44
@WhatsUp Same here. – risky mysteries Aug 18 '20 at 15:34
Mildly related Whitespace – Andrew Savinykh Aug 18 '20 at 21:35
3

@SagarChand - selecting the place where the post text would have been gave me a bunch of invisible - but selected - text. That already meant that there's some invisible character trickery going on. Which was my first idea anyway. Next step was right-click and "Inspect" the HTML code in the built in developer tools. Ahh! HTML entities! There we go.... – Vilx- Aug 19 '20 at 10:04

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