[Tech] You're missing some "Rec" and "Microsoft" newsgroups?
Bob
We frequently receive requests to add newsgroups to our local news
servers, and while we can typically accommodate most "Alt" group additions, this
process is handled a little differently within some of the other Usenet
hierarchies.
In general, the Big-8 hierarchy (Rec, Comp, Misc, etc.) has a more rigid
set of guidelines than the "Alt" hierarchy when it comes to the creation,
addition and removal of Usenet newsgroups, and this system is maintained by
David Lawrence and the ISC.ORG site. When this location verifies a legitimate
creation of a new Big-8 newsgroup a control message is forwarded to our news
server to announce the addition of the group within the Usenet community, and
the group is then automatically created on our local Newsguy news servers.
Sometimes a Big-8 newsgroup will become inactive over time, or it may evolve
into a new group, and the original discussion forum may have to be removed
as a result. When a decision is made to drop a newsgroup from Usenet,
ISC.ORG/David Lawrence will send out a remove group message (rmgroup), which
eventually gets picked up by other news servers on the Internet. When the
"rmgroup" message is received at our local news servers, they locate the
specific newsgroup, and the forum is removed from our group list.
While we could ignore these "control" and "rmgroup" requests, and wind up
with 60,000+ newsgroups on our local list, a good portion of those groups would
be inactive, obsolete, or bogus discussion forums. In situations like this, news
users cannot access any legitimate content within those types of newsgroups, and
they essentially get stuck having to download a huge newsgroups list, most of
which is useless.
In addition to the Big-8 newsgroups, you may run across other Usenet
hierarchies that are maintained by a company to support their products and
services. The Microsoft newsgroups are a good example of this, and like the
Big-8 process, these types of hierarchies create and remove newsgroups from a
master list that they maintain. When changes are made to their newsgroup list,
they will propagate those changes to other Internet news servers, who in turn
update their local newsgroup lists to reflect those changes.
You can get a better feel for this create/remove process by lurking in the
following newsgroups...
alt.config
control.newgroup
control.rmgroup
news.admin.hierarchies
news.announce.newgroups
news.groups
...and of course, the ISC.ORG site is a great resource for the control messages,
charter/FAQ info, and newsgroup listings...
In addition, if you should run across an active newsgroup, that you would like
to see added to Newsguy, please send a request to the following discussion
forum...
newsguy.addgroup.propose
...and we'd be happy to look into adding the group on this end.
Best regards,
B...@newsguy.com