How a USENET Newsgroup is Created
The USENET is a decentralized system, which means that there is no central authority that makes rules for it. There is, however, a group of people known as the Big 8 Management Board that controls the creation and deletion of newsgroups on the Big 8 hierarchy and on the Five Alternative hierarchies. There is also a specific process that users go through to create their own newsgroup. Use groups generally only need to be created when there is a very good reason for it. There are thousands of groups within the major hierarchies already, so most user’s needs are already served by one of the existing groups.
When a group of users decide that they want to create a new newsgroup, the discussion usually starts on related newsgroups. When they’re ready to actually ask the Big 8 Management Board to have a discussion about the newsgroup, they post what’s called a Request for Discussion on the newsgroup news.announce.newsgroups. If the Request for Discussion is approved, the discussion is carried on in detail on another newsgroup within the news hierarchy, news.groups.proposals. The discussion usually continues on related newsgroups, as well. The Big 8 Management Board determines whether or not the newsgroup will be created. If they find no need to create the new newsgroup, the process moves no further. If they do, a series of events takes place.
First, the Big 8 Management Board sends out a special type of message, called a control message, over the USENET system. This message requests that the servers within the system create the new newsgroup. Because the Big 8 Management Board is not really a central authority, however, it is still up to the individual server administrators whether or not they decide to add the newsgroup to their server. Most often, new groups within the Big 8 or Five Alternative hierarchies do get approved. Other hierarchies may or may not be approved and many of the newsgroups created within the less-established hierarchies are generally not worth creating on all of the various USENET news servers.
Once the control message is sent out, the newsgroup is created and people can start posting. A control message can also be used to remove a newsgroup if it’s outlived its usefulness. USENET newsgroups may be removed because there aren’t enough posts to justify keeping them going or because the subject matter that they covered is no longer of a great enough interest to enough people.
With so many newsgroups to choose from, it’s not very common that new newsgroups are created on the major hierarchies. On the alt hierarchy, however, there are many new newsgroups created all the time, though they are not taken as seriously by USENET users or server administrators.
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