Acronomicon Instructions

The Acronomicon won’t take you long to pick up. Basically, it is a word game in which you are shown some random letters (we call it an acronym, or just "nym" for short) and you try to come up with a sequence of words for which those letters could be an acronym. We call these sequences of words acronomes, which is usually shortened to "nome." Then, you can look at the nomes submitted by other users and vote on which is best. Before explaining the site's rules, let me explain the interface a bit.

Viewers

You should be seeing something that says "New Nyms" and has a list of acronyms in it. This is a viewer. On the main page of the site you will have three of them available. At the moment, the viewer is showing you the four acronyms most recently generated by the system, along with how many nomes have already been submitted for each of them. If you want to change the data that a viewer is displaying, just steer your mouse over to the little words just below the viewer's title (e.g. where it says "nomes" between the two horizontal white lines). When you do this you should see a little drop down menu appear with a couple options. Click on one and you'll see how the viewer refreshes itself with the new data. The title of the menu tells you what type of entity it will display, and the menu item that you choose will tell you how that data is being ordered. So clicking on the "top rated" item in the "nomes" menu will show you all the top rated nomes. Since the Acronomicon is still in beta at the moment, your choices are limited as to what the viewer may display, but we will be adding new views frequently as the site is developed.

Since there are usually more than 4 items to display, you can use the "next" and "prev" links at the bottom of the viewer to scroll through the data.

Voting

You have the option of voting on other users’ acronomes whenever you like. Of course you only get one vote per acronome, but it may be changed at any time. Since we’re at The Third Olive right now, all votes are counted in terms of olives. Zero olives is the worst. Three the best. You have to be viewing a nome in the main viewing area (so you will be able to see it’s comments) in order to cast a vote. The voting area is just below the nome itself. Save your 3 olive vote for the best Nome of any given Nym though—you are only allowed to rate a one nome of each nym at 3 olives.

Writing your own nomes

To write your own nome, you have to fire up the composer, which can be reached by way of the "composer" link that is at the top right hand corner of the main page. Once the composer is loaded, you will see a familiar sight: some viewers in the sidebar. Using these viewers, you can select a nym for which you want to write a nome. Or, you can just use the random nome that will appear for you. Once you've writen a new nome, just click the "Submit Acronome" button.

Rules

There are scant few rules in the Acronomicon, since all the space is taken up with nyms and nomes. However, here are some rules and guidelines that you should be aware of:

• You may only cast one three-olive vote per acronym. If you rate an acronome with three olives, but you have already rated an acronome with the same acronym at three olives the older vote will be deleted. Make sure to save your three olive vote for the best nome of a given acronym.
• You can’t vote on your own acronomes.
• Words separated by only an el-dash (that’s a single dash) will be considered a compound word. Words separated by en- or em-dashes (two or three dashes) will count as completely separate words.
• Try to use punctuation correctly in your Nomes. In your comments though, go wild—only the < and > symbols are off limits in comments.
• You can submit as many acronomes for a given acronym as you like.
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