Join the channel in my signature, we can help you live in there.
For timer2 you can use $regsubex(%answer,/[^ ]/g,*) to replace every character in %answer (except for space codepoint 32) by an asterix, so your timer2 could be about sending just that.
For timer3, you can make a while loop on all the words and replace the non-first character & non-last character of the word by '*', or you can also just $regsubex(%answer,/\b[^ ]([^ ]+)[^ ]\b/g/,$str(*,$len(\1))) which should do the trick (untested but won't work for 2 letters word and less)
For timer4, you can start with the value from timer3 and just replace one '*' per word
You're not forced to use regex but they make the code way easier to read, I suggest you get helped on IRC where we can answer any question you have and help with non-regex, or regex solutions.
