Forums Bug Reports Zero-width character

Is there a character (or a sequence of such) which will be really rendered as if it wasn't there by mIRC?

I'm maintaining a bot which is announcing GitHub / Bugzilla / etc. activity, and I'm trying to avoid highlighting people in the channel. (It's annoying to be highlighted every time you file a new bug etc.)

To accomplish this, I've tried inserting a zero-width Unicode character in the middle of each word. I've already tried a few variations of the Unicode zero-width space, as well as some Unicode meta-characters such as the ones which change RTL directions. However, all of these still show up in mIRC as a narrow space, messing with the kerning and making the line look weird.

I've also tried to insert formatting (color/bold/etc.) characters, but these do not break highlighting in mIRC.