GhostText Detector for Unicode Superscripts

Who it's for

Forum moderators, content reviewers, and legal/document reviewers who currently use raw hex dumps or copy-paste into character viewers to spot hidden characters.

The problem

Time: manually hunting invisible characters in a 10-page document takes 30+ minutes; legal: hidden bidi text can alter contract meaning, creating liability.

How to build it

Browser extension (Chrome/Firefox) + a small CLI for file-based scanning; integrates with Gmail, Discourse, and common forum editors via DOM scan.

How it makes money

Moderators of large forums (e.g., subreddits with 1M+ users) would pay $20/month for a team plan to auto-scan reported posts; legal reviewers pay per-use $50/hour saved. Free option is manual hex inspection which costs 30x more time.

Why it doesn't exist yet

Incumbents (e.g., W3C validator, bidi test tools) are developer-focused and don't surface hidden characters in a human-readable visual format for non-engineers; the gap is a zero-click visual overlay that works on any webpage.

First users

HN readers of the 'spectre haunting Unicode' thread (145pt) who want to test pasted text; forum moderators on sites like Reddit or specialized boards that have had trolling via zero-width characters.

Build size

1 person x 6 weeks — scope: Chrome/Firefox extension that scans DOM text nodes and highlights hidden characters with a colored underline and tooltip; CLI version for file input; no PDF parsing (excluded).

Biggest risk

No platform is likely to ship this natively (browsers won't highlight hidden characters for security reasons — it would break copy-paste fidelity).

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• When a page loads, every invisible Unicode char (zero-width space, joiner, bidi override, variation selector) gets a dashed orange underline and a hover tooltip showing its codepoint name and hex value; count shown in a small badge on the toolbar icon.
• For a selected block of text (via right-click context menu), generates a one-click 'clean copy' that removes all hidden chars and a summary of what was removed (types and counts) — works in any contenteditable or textarea.
• CLI command `ghost-text scan file.txt` outputs a line-numbered report with visible `[ZWSP]` placeholders and an optional `--strip` flag to produce a sanitized file.

How it's judged (in 6 months)

GitHub repo reaches 500 stars, or a public post on HN with 100+ points announcing the tool, or 100+ weekly active users on the extension store with a public stats page.(judgment date 2027-02-16)

AI self-confidence 60/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate