created by Geraldine_VdAuwera
on 2014-02-27
When people sign up for an account on the forum, the signup form includes the following question:
“What does SNP stand for?”
This is simply one of many ways we try to fight forum spam and bogus accounts. We don’t really require people to answer correctly, but it’s surprisingly good at tripping up spam bots and even some human spammers (sad, sad creatures that they are).
Most people know or make a pretty good guess (allowing for occasional language issues); and on the other hand there are some folks who clearly don’t have the time to go into such a complicated question (/snark) and simply mash the keyboard in irritation, yielding such enlightening responses as “fhstdgf” (with local variations due to language-specific keyboard layouts).
My favorite, though, are the really creative answers we get from the (presumed) sysadmins and assorted IT support staff who get tasked to deploy GATK to their institution’s clusters and user workstations, but haven’t got the foggiest what a SNP might be in our particular jargon-filled domain, and therefore propose their own interpretations.
——
In terms of allele frequency, the Scottish National Party is the all-time winner, with multiple mentions, recurring fairly regularly. I hear there’s a big genomics center in Edinburgh; seems like the IT department there might be a hotbed of independentists.
At lower frequencies but on the more creative end, we’ve seen:
- short nomadic pirates (Jawas of the high seas? possibly my favorite so far)
- Subliminal Negative Programming (no, GATK only does positive subliminal programming)
- Show Nasty Pictures (what, like a really messed up VQSR plot?)
- Seychelles National Party (ooh, a regional variant)
- Superman Nix Prankster (comics geek?)
- Sausage with Noodles and Pancakes (the gastronomy edition)
- Silver Nanoparticles (well, it’s a sciencey thing, so that’s pretty close)
Admittedly this may be of limited interest to the community, but I just wanted to tell the fine folks who took the time to turn in creative answers: a human read them, and was amused. (Seriously, it makes my day when a really good one comes through.)
Incidentally some of you may recall that the question used to be “Why do you want to join the forum?” (which was just the Vanilla preset). We changed it because it clearly enraged some people who resented having to sign up in order to download the software. I’m not convinced it’s such a huge imposition in exchange for an arguably very useful (and to them, very free) piece of software… but I’m probably biased.
Oh, and if you’re still reading: we’re going to release 3.0 next week (if all goes well).
Updated on 2014-02-27
From Geraldine_VdAuwera on 2014-03-20
As an update, we’ve also recently received the following suggestions:
- Sexy Nerdy Players (ahem, let’s keep it professional)
- Syndicat National de la Podologie (for our French-speaking audience)
- Super Paramagnetic Clustering (but… the letters aren’t right…?)
From kwyattm on 2014-05-22
I just happened across this post, but it certainly made my day! :)
I might use “short nomadic pirates” (is there any other type, what with the poor nutrition associated with a life at sea as a – er -nomad?
From Geraldine_VdAuwera on 2014-08-27
We have a new favorite for best “meaning of SNP” answer: Still No Paper