So I wanted to be productive today...(!puzzle) [Ended and solution posted]

...and get some serious work done for my research project. But as things didn't work as I wanted them to work, not soon afterwards I spent my time in the vast open space of this thing called Internet.

And there I found for example this!

How about you?

EDIT: The giveaway is over now, so here's the (exceptionally detailed) solution:

The text was obviously just some distraction and the linked picture as well. But on the exclamation mark was another link 'hidden'. Pretty common in the forum I think, easy so far. ;)

That link led here. There's a short description, that this is not a puzzle, but a !puzzle (NOTpuzzle). As there was only one real question to solve (regardless of difficulty of that one!) I didn't want to call this a puzzle...

After reading the description the first two questions were rather obvious. First answer could be '!puzzle' or 'not a puzzle' and second answer 'puzzle' or 'a puzzle'.

Now the third question was a bit tricky. In (deliberate) contrary to other puzzles over here that cryptic string was not an encryption. As I was asking for what was missing in that string, there was obviously no way of guessing characters if it would have been encrypted (like Base64 with a '=' at the end). So it had to be something different and looking for a clue there was this sentence: 'But would be a lot more Real fun to Game when there were Two of you Players, right?' (which was also meant to be as a reference to the giveaway, like some other sentences on that page). Taking the odd mid-sentence capitalized words would give: real game two players. So if you didn't instantly recognize what that string was about, I would suggest a Google search at this point: first try. What, no result!? Maybe vary the search string... second try. Actually you could probably take any substring and google it and would have found out that this is Algebraic Chess Notation minimalised for getting one string. After that it was really easy, that's the well-known Scholar's Mate and the missing characters were xf7.

Finally you would have found this giveaway.

Stats: 60 players, 11 solved it, 7 entries for 2 copies. Good odds for the entrants I'd say. ;)

I hope some of you enjoyed this small !puzzle and those who didn't find their way to the giveaway hopefully didn't get too frustrated over their search. Though I'm sorry about this, but as it was only one question with just one twist to find out I didn't want to give further hints.