When I create a post with a title like ‘NASA’ it humanizes it to ‘Nasa’ and won’t let me change it (editing it to ‘NASA’ still reverts it to the humanized form).
This seems to only happen when I reduce the number of required characters for a title in Settings.
Pretty sure this is due to the enabled-by-default site setting title prettify which incorectly assumes it knows better than you what NASA is. 
Did you try to disable it and see if it still changes?
Thanks for the quick reply. When I remove the prettify setting for the title I get this error. I also lowered the title entropy to 3, but the error persists.
I re-enabled prettify (with the title length and entropy set to 3) and it posts, but changes the title to Nasa
Unfortunately Topic titles are required to have at least one lowercase letter. There does not appear to be a way to disable this requirement.
Unfortunately, the error message once again isn’t helpful in determining why your post isn’t allowed. Apparently this confusion is intended & by design:
What the OP is referring to is the first word of the title, I am pretty sure. And there’s an existing topic on this. So
I love NASA!
will work fine (barring length minimums) but
NASA is the best!
Will get converted to “Nasa”, which is kind of a bug.
What is the exact title here?
The title is actually ‘NASA’
yeah, then you’re falling into the rule i mentioned earlier where all caps topic titles are not allowed.
Would making it not be the first “word” be acceptable? eg,
AFAIK it would be nigh impossible to have script make a distinction between YELLING and a valid acronym without relying on a dictionary of some sort.
I imagine code could be written that would allow Admins to whitelist acronyms, but is this a common enough problem that efforts to do so would have a reasonable ROI ?
Between the feature creep (code bloat) and the increased maintenance cost of a whitelist I’m thinking a hacky work-around likely makes miore sense as the solution
Or maybe spell it out?
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
That could get for some potentially rather long titles.
Actually, on further thought, Discourse does have a large collection of common passwords, so if one were to submit a collection of common acronyms it might be possible to twist some arms and get that into the topic title code
The description for the “title prettify” setting is:
Prevent common title typos and errors, including all caps, lowercase first character, multiple ! and ?, extra . at end, etc.
Surely if it is disabled then one should be free to write all caps titles as they please? Seems a bit inconsistent that it still attempts to “prettify” it even if you disable this setting.
That is a terrible title for a topic, surely better can be done 
Not that my use case is common, but this can prove to be difficult when trying to use game titles for topics. XCOM for example is not allowed.
I personally would prefer disabling that setting to fully disable it, but it’s not a major concern for me.
We had that exact problem with this particular example, and many others. It actually caused some frustration among users, who don’t like Discourse telling them how things should be!
it should be totally disablable … the fact it is not is a bug.
A bit late to the discussion, but we have topics starting with CSS, HTML, FLEXBOX (dunno why that should be all-caps, but still…) without a problem. Unfortunately, I don’t know what our site settings are. @cpradio - do you know?
(I do know we’re still on Discourse 1.3.0.beta7.)
Fairly certain we have Title Prettify enabled.
This is an Admin accessibility thing @ralphm should be able to see what the current setting is