This is a plea from an under educated WW2 sim player. I know that everyone knows what all the abbreviations you use in your specific area of expertise mean, be it flight sim or real world applications, but I am continually going to Google looking for explanations. All too often there are so many variations using the same abbreviation that it’s pretty darn close to impossible to figure out which Govt alphabet soup abbreviation is the correct one. Please, when it comes to abbreviations remember that not all of us are clued in on every possible common or uncommon usage when it comes to abbreviations and consider adding the real meaning in parenthesis for us common folk, and our outside readers who are trying to decide if they want to join and may not since they don’t want to feel dumb or unable to participate due to their lack of knowledge.
I’ve added some simple abbreviation support to our UI.
We can add to a central list if it would help. Record them here in this topic as replies and we can add them periodically. Obviously the more obscure the better, as we don’t want too many for common product names etc.
Here’s a couple of examples (you can hover or click on to see the meaning, and abbreviation is indicated with a dotted line)
Anything I don’t write is tl;dr.
I asked him to rtfm and he agreed it was fine!
Hope that helps!
I can also add some more formal Footnote support, but that’s a bit more to do, so not sure how popular that would be.
In the eye of the beholder while in acronym format. If explained out to full terms that aren’t PG-13 then we’d just delete the post. If it happened a lot we’d just delete the user. Easy!
BUFF - Big Ugly Fat Fellow**
FUBAR - Fouled** up Beyond All Recognition
SNAFU - Situation Normal All Fouled** Up
BOHICA - Bend Over, Here It Comes Again
Those should fall within the guidelines but they really aren’t that obscure.
Don’t forget that there’s others that can mean two separate things, like CIWS (Close In Weapon System) which also gained another meaning early on due to unfortunate implications.
Rumors/legends/myths I’ve heard was early on, the preferred name was “C**** It Won’t Shoot!” – reason being, early on it was designed for direct attack threats, but not popup attacks. So if the missile/aircraft did an extreme pull up (like most modern ASMs(Anti-Ship Missiles) do), the system would think the target was dead and cease to engage when instead it was just making a top attack.
While @staff can add some to a central list, it would be better if people could add their own to a post as well.
I’ve enabled something called a
<abbr>
HTML tag. The way you use it is this:
'<abbr title="Crazy Obscure Acronym Only I Use">COAOIU</abbr>'
So in a sentence that would be:
This is really cool, but what about COAOIU usage?
Which looks like this in the post editor and what you would type:
This is really cool, but what about <abbr title="Crazy Obscure Acronym Only I Use">COAOIU</abbr> usage?
So, to get back to @wheelsup_cavu original ask, if people want to put their acronyms in a way that others can hover (you only ‘click or touch’ in mobile, as there is no hover) and find out what they mean then they now can. If ones get used a lot we’ll add them to the main list so it happens automatically.
