I’ve had some feedback today that Decronym is “spamming” unrelated acronym definitions into threads that don’t need them. Unfortunately, details of which acronyms are superfluous wasn’t forthcoming, so:
From this list, which acronyms do you guys think can be removed as unnecessary to explain?
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I agree with the person who suggested linking to Wikipedia articles.
For example, it’s not much help to learn that PCIe stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, because nobody calls it that. As an outsider, now I’m wondering what a component interconnect is. It’s much more useful to link to a page that gives context about how PCIe is actually used.
In a previous post, someone pointed out it does not help much saying what PCIe stands for without a short explanation.
You are trying to de-jargon topics, and that’s fine, but the two following categories do not help, they are localized habits and don’t have any value to non-english or nontechnical people, or both:
- shortenings: a11y for accessibility is not a common contraction, it’s not helpful for anyone to understand the term itself
- names of services: CF for cloudflare is not something worth defining. Names change, and you wouldn’t see this in a professional document. It’s like defining “lol”, the acronym is shorthand in typed communication, not technical jargon.
Side note, DNS stands for domain name system, it has never meant domain name service.
I personally find bots annoying, half the content on the internet is already bots.
I like the bot as is and wouldn’t change it or remove any.
I think a lot of people here take for granted how much they know.
I’ve blocked the bot because I find it’s more annoying that useful (I’m not complaining - just giving feedback).
That said, IMHO from that list you should remove the entries that:
- are ambiguous (eg: HA has 2 entirely different meanings in your list)
- have become words on their own (eg. DNS, HTTP, etc…): nobody cares what these expand to (think, NASA) and also knowing what these expand to doesn’t help at all (if you tell me that HTTP means “hyper-text markup protocol” will I not have to go read wikipedia anyways to understand what it is?)
- are often not used according to your definition (eg. IP is more often used to refer to an IP address rather than to the protocol) - of course you may want to amend the definitions instead
Also, you should keep the acronym expansion (“RAID” => “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”) from any comment you may want to add (“for mass storage”) and - since you are at it - provide relevant links to wikipedia articles and/or other resources.
PS: since a lot of entries in the list are not even acronyms… maybe you should consider renaming the bot to something related to “abbreviations” or “glossary”?
I have no hard opinion either way. It’s kind of neat in what it does. I’ve often wondered if we wrote a post with nothing but acronyms, if it would sent the bot into a tizz.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point CA (SSL) Certificate Authority CF CloudFlare DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IP Internet Protocol IoT Internet of Things for device controllers NAT Network Address Translation PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption a11y A(ccessibilit)y i18n I(nternationalizatio)n l10n L(ocalizatio)n
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I don’t have any issue with it myself, I think it’s a great idea.
These acronyms I’ve never seen before and have never been used by the bot:
a11y
i18n
l10n
kind of ironic to abbreviate the word accessibility
LMAO spot on!
If this is about the bot I think it is, I haven’t personally complained but I have noticed it’s weird and often wrong, it seems to detect HTTP/HTTPS in every post (perhaps seeing links and URLs?) and it seems to maybe possibly be detecting any words with those strings of letters somewhere in them and presumably also doesn’t care about case sensitivity? The short ones in particular like “AP”, “CA”, “CF”, “HA” and “IP” seem to come up frequently almost every time it posts, and “NAT” and “IoT” seems common, and none of things seem to be actually mentioned in any of the comments that I see.
