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Last puzzle: RIP Puzzling! (#1)

So, you turn off dark mode, and things seem normal at first, but then you see a message at the bottom in red that looked something like this...

Hahaaaha! What are you going to do now?

You write it in paper, and you say, "Sure, I'm going to figure out what you're planning!"

But then you realize that something, something weird was happening to Stack Overflow. All the questions disappeared, then the answers, then the HNQ, until everything disappeared. All that was left was the same message that you saw when you turned off dark mode.

Bad luck then takes over, and your computer freezes. You restart it frantically and went to the site again. Same note. You went to the sites he was going to kill. Same note.

Hints:

Maybe the bolds and italics?

NOPUNCTUATION

The message is the key

Order

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  • $\begingroup$ Huh? Seriously? What's wrong with this? $\endgroup$
    – new Q Open Wid
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 20:12

2 Answers 2

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The farthest I've gotten is the phrase

O RIPS TAGS AT:
In the message [which is the key], the bolded and italicized letters appear with 1,2,3,5,8,... letters behind them, respectively. On the assertion that this is, in fact, the Fibonacci sequence, counting off letters [ignoring punctuation] in the rest of the story yields the above phrase.

The bold and italic letters by themselves don't seem to have any meaning, and I don't see an immediate next step. Perhaps the hacker plans to

delete all the tags from PSE, except he's already deleted the puzzles!

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  • $\begingroup$ There's a more obvious next step. Can you find it? $\endgroup$
    – new Q Open Wid
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 19:53
  • $\begingroup$ I've accepted this answer, but it's more simple than that, okay? But, I'm still going to accept. $\endgroup$
    – new Q Open Wid
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 18:01
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My answer:

The hacker plans on victory.

Explanation:

The bolds and italics in
> Hahaaaha! What are you going to do now?
spells out AWET.

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  • $\begingroup$ Good guess... but @AxiomaticSystem's answer is more in line. $\endgroup$
    – new Q Open Wid
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 16:51

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