@eriner @djsumdog someone once explained to me the names of fiber connectors by what they do
ST, stick and twist, very rare these days
SC, stick and click
LC, little click, most common
and then there's the angled connectors that are either SC/APC or LC/APC. they have a little bit of an angled face to reduce reflection and are mostly used on GPON stuff for internet service. these are always green, and will get fucked up if you plug angled stuff into not angled stuff.
the only types of fiber that really matter at this point are singlemode and multimode. yeah you might find some old orange multimode with the 62.5 micron core instead of the newer teal 50 micron core but in my experience the core mismatch isn't likely to cause enough attenuation to cause problems. anything new should be singlemode, we only ever used multimode because the laser optics for singlemode used to be expensive, now they're maybe a couple bucks more at most. singlemode is usually yellow, but sometimes dark blue and often in a black jacket for outdoor use. multimode LC connectors will usually be tan, singlemode will usually be dark blue.

as for lightning protection, there's this nice motorola manual for communications site design with whole chapters about grounding and surge protection: https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/Lands_ROW_Motorola_R56_2005_manual.pdf