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I discovered that there is a little-used tag "ptc" which appears to be used for questions involving polyfuses (Polymeric Positive Temperature Coefficient devices). The tag "pptc" is already a synonym for polyfuse. Should "ptc" be as well?

Edit:

A comment from W5VO:

The barrier to entry isn't really the merging part, but the synonym. Due to the way the StackExchange is set up, synonyms are really hard to put in place without moderator support.

Perhaps suggesting a synonym is less ideal than just retagging the questions; however, at my company, we usually refer to polyfuses as "PTCs" so perhaps it is a common usage?

Is it better to simply retag questions?

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We've already looked at combining into in this answer. (for reference, not finality). We merged the tags, but did not keep a synonym because the concept of PTC (Positive Temperature Coefficient) is not synonymous with a thermally resetting polyfuse. As an aside, there has been only one question tagged that was not about polyfuses.

Since high-enough rep users recreated after it was removed, we're back at the issue of having two terms that refer to polyfuses without clear indications of what people should use. The options (that I see) are:

  1. We make synonyms with , and we lose the ability to tag things based on only having a positive temperature coefficient.
  2. We manually edit the questions tagged as they come up. People who refer to polyfuses as "PTC" may be confused if doesn't exist, because there won't be any pointers to . If they have more than 300 rep, they will end up creating it anyways.
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    \$\begingroup\$ Interesting; I apologize for not seeing the answer you linked. What if there were simply separate tags: ptc-fuse and ptc-device? They would show up for users starting to type the "ptc" portion of the tag. \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Mar 7, 2014 at 19:44
  • \$\begingroup\$ @JYelton Honestly, I'm leaning towards making the synonym, because you are rarely talking about the effect, just a polyfuse. This is something that I think should be voted on. I don't think that keeping the acronym in a primary tag is a good idea. \$\endgroup\$
    – W5VO
    Mar 7, 2014 at 20:40
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    \$\begingroup\$ As you say, PTC does not specify a polyfuse. It simply means positive temperature coefficient, which is a rather broad parameter that can apply to various things. It is really a bad abbreviation to use, and should be discouraged. Referring to a polyfuse as a "PTC" is just wrong, and we shouldn't encourange it. Thermistors are broadly divded into positive and negative temperature coeficient types. The resistivity of copper wire or the fillament of a light bulb has a positive temperature coefficient. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    May 6, 2014 at 20:13

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