Table of Contents
This document provides basic instructions for starting a new newsgroup . Newsgroups are topic areas available on netnews , a facility that allows reading of articles on a news server , responding publicly to the article in a followup or privately in a reply , and posting new articles on subjects of your own choosing.
Netnews should not be confused with USENET ; both USENET and netnews use the same protocol, reader programs and storage methods, but USENET is limited to the so-called "Big 7" topic groups, called hierarchies : comp , misc , news , rec , sci , soc and talk . Netnews as a whole includes many other topic hierarchies that, while not as widely carried worldwide as the USENET ones, include much more diverse information. Some of the most important non-USENET netnews hierarchies are regional hierarchies , which provide information specific to certain geographical areas. The ones affecting us at UNC are the unc hierarchy (which provides information only to people reading news at UNC); the nc hierarchy (limited to North Carolina and a few other out-of-state sites); and the triangle hierarchy (effectively another hierarchy for all of North Carolina since sites as far away as Wilmington and Asheville receive it, but with a topical emphasis on the Triangle area).This document explains the procedures for creating a new newsgroup in the USENET hierarchies, the regional hierarchies affecting us ( unc , triangle , and nc ) and the bit hierarchy for newsgroups mirrored with list server lists . Most other hierarchies include a newsgroup called <hierarchy name>. admin which will explain the procedure for creating newsgroups in that hierarchy. Words in boldface are defined in the short glossary at the end of this document.
Before you decide to create a newsgroup, you must ask yourself the following questions:
? What is the topic of the newsgroup?
? What hierarchy does it belong in?
? What should its name be?
? Should it be moderated or unmoderated?
? Is there a list server that it should be mirrored with?
? Should I run the creation process myself, or should someone else?
The topic of the newsgroup should be broad enough to merit its own group (for example, a newsgroup on morphological phenomena in Mongoloid languages would not have enough readers to merit a group; create a list server list or post to sci.linguistics instead) but narrow enough so that the topic is well-defined and not all-encompassing (for example, a newsgroup about science fiction would be too broad; already there are nearly a hundred groups on different topics in science fiction).
The topic should suggest a hierarchy. The "Big-7" newsgroups are for worldwide newsgroups on the subjects of computers ( comp ), miscellaneous topics ( misc ), netnews and administrative groups ( news ), recreational activities ( rec ), science ( sci ), social and cultural discussion ( soc ) and political and other discussions ( talk ). Groups specifically related to UNC should be in the unc hierarchy, groups specifically related to the triangle should be in the triangle hierarchy, and to North Carolina should be in the nc hierarchy. If you have a large world-wide list server list which you want to be mirrored on a newsgroup, use the bit hierarchy. Further, there are subheirarchies in some hierarchies. For example, the rec.arts.startrek hierarchy includes at least six newsgroups; the hierarchy containing it, rec.arts , includes over fifty-one newsgroups.
The name should follow from the topic, but a few caveats: it is recommended that you separate words with hyphens, not periods. You cannot use punctuation marks or uppercase letters; numbers are generally not recommended, but are allowable in special circumstances. The name should be the shortest possible to fully describe the topic of the group. The name should not indicate a bias towards a particular ideology. Finally, the name should not contain any words generally considered vulgar or offensive.
Moderation is the next thing that must be considered. A moderated newsgroup has a person called a moderator who receives all posts to the newsgroup, from anywhere in the world, by mail and must then approve the post before it will be distributed via netnews. An unmoderated newsgroup allows anyone to post. The advantages of a moderated newsgroup are that it lowers the number of posts that the end users must read, it often increases the quality of the posts in the newsgroup, and it eliminates the possibility of a flame war ? when an argument escalates into verbal abuse. On the other hand, being moderator is a good deal of work ? in one extreme example, the moderator of rec.humor.funny is a paid full-time employee of a company that prints books of jokes taken from USENET, and her entire job is moderating the newsgroup. Most moderators can expect an hour or more of work per day, and complaints when he or she takes time off or does not work during the weekend. Unmoderated newsgroups, on the other hand, increase the speed of discussion ? a thread can progress much faster in such a group. Late-breaking news need not wait for a moderator?s approval to be disseminated.
USENET is often called a "creative anarchy," and the method used to create new newsgroups reflects this. No one has the final say on whether a newsgroup will be created or not, every news administrator can decide whether a particular group will be carried on his or her site, and while the generally agreed-upon procedure below seems to be hard and fast rules, many groups were created in violation of these rules. Like the Internet itself, USENET is more of a set of agreements between different people and computers than a concrete organization. The creation of a USENET newsgroup normally involves three steps: a request for discussion (RFD), a call for votes (CFV) and the actual newsgroup creation.
The first step is a request for discussion, known as an RFD. You should post a description of the proposed newsgroup, including a suggested name, suggested moderation status (and, if moderated, the name and email address of the proposed moderator) and other information you feel relevant, to news.announce.newgroups , crossposted to any other relevant newsgroups. Then, a discussion of the group proposal will commence on the newsgroup news.groups . After 30 days, if there is consensus that a new group is desired, then the proposal goes on to the second step, the call for votes. If there is no general agreement on this, or on the name, charter (what the newsgroup will be about) or moderation status, then the discussion should be taken off-line into email, and a new RFD reflecting the new consensus should be made. The process then starts all over again.
The second step is a call for votes, known as a CFV. After the discussion period, the call for votes should be posted to news.announce.newgroups , crossposted to the same newsgroups the RFD was crossposted to. The call for votes should be posted with as little delay as possible after the discussion period has passed. The moderator of news.announce.newgroups will reject your call for votes if it does not meet all of the following criteria:
? The CFV includes an unbiased description of the newsgroup, with its name, a brief summary of the charter, moderation status and moderator, if any. This description should take no more than a few sentences; it should not influence the reader to vote for or against creation of the group.
? The CFV explains clearly and precisely how to vote for or against creation of the newsgroups.
? The vote should be taken via email. It should be exactly as easy to vote against the group as for it, and vice versa. The email address for voting may or may not be the same as that of the poster of the CFV. If two addresses are used, one for yes votes and one for no votes, then the address which is generated by replying to the post should accept neither.
A voting period should last at least 21 days, starting from the time the CFV was posted and ending on midnight (in the local time of the vote-taker?s machine) on the twenty-first day, and no more than 31 days, defined in the same manner. A vote-taker may not call off the voting period, no matter what the preliminary voting results are, and may not divulge the preliminary results. A vote-taker may wish to post up to two repeats of the CFV (known as the "2nd CFV" and the "3rd CFV"), and may in these posts make public the email addresses of all those who have cast a vote (without divulging which way they voted). This is known as a "mass acknowledgment," and are sometimes posted as separate posts, called "1st ACK," "2nd ACK," and so on.
At the end of the voting period, the vote-taker must post the final vote tally with the email addresses (and if available, the names) of the voters (along with which way they voted ? there?s no secret ballot on USENET!), again to news.announce.newgroups and other relevant groups. A waiting period of five days then begins so that voters can verify that they actually voted the way the tally says they did. After the waiting period, assuming there were no serious objections to the method of voting that might invalidate the vote, a result is posted, with a subject like "RESULT: soc.culture.tuvan passes 458:32" or "RESULT: comp.lang.applescript fails 54:40."
A newsgroup proposal passes if there were no serious objections to the voting process, and if 100 more valid YES votes were received than NO votes, and if at least 2/3 of the votes were for the creation of the group. If the proposal passes, then the moderator of news.announce.newgroups will post the message to the control newsgroup which creates the newsgroup. If the proposal fails, then another RFD may be made after a six-month waiting period.
The procedure for creating a regional newsgroup is much simpler than for a worldwide USENET group. If you are interested in creating a group in the unc hierarchy, simply mail the ITS news administrator, Lorris Woods ( lorris_woods@unc.edu ) describing the newsgroup and asking it to be created.If you want to create a newsgroup in the triangle or nc hierarchies, post an RFD to triangle.config or nc.config . After a two or three week discussion period, if there are no serious objections to the newsgroup proposal, mail a request to create the newsgroup to Lorris Woods. There is no voting for regional newsgroup proposals.
If you have a list server list which you would like to make available as a worldwide newsgroup (known as a "gateway"), post to the list asking if that is acceptable to the members of the list. If it is, post to bit.admin asking if there are any objections to a gateway called bit.listserv.<list-name> . If there are no serious objections, write to news-admin@auvm.american.edu asking that the gateway be set up, and indicate that the owner of the list, the members of the list, and the readers of bit.admin do not object to the creation of the group. Include a short (45 character maximum) description of the list. In this message, you must also tell whether you want the list to be a two-way mirror (meaning that whether someone posts via email to the list server or via posting to netnews the post will show up on both sides) or a one-way mirror (where posting is only allowed from either email or posts). ITS does not recommend that list servers be gatewayed to regional hierarchies because of limited readership.
article ? a single message available via netnews . An article may be posted to a single newsgroup or crossposted to multiple newsgroups. Also called a " post ." An article has a From: , Date: , and Subject: line just like an email message.
boldface ? a heavy typeface used for emphasis.
crosspost1 ? to make an article available in more than one newsgroup . This may be done when an article is not easily pigeonholed into one topic area. For example, an article on materials science research at UNC might be crossposted to unc.physics , sci.physics and sci.chem . Crossposting is preferable to posting two articles for two reasons: first, if an article is crossposted, the news reader knows that there is only one article and users who read more than one newsgroup in which the article was crossposted will not have to read the article twice; and second, the news server only has to keep one copy of the article on its local disk, saving disk space for other articles.
crosspost2 ? an article that has been crossposted .
followup ? a public response to an earlier article in the form of an article. Followups may be read by anyone who could read the earlier article. Followups often quote lines of the previous article so that very precise (and sometimes nitpicky) responses may be given; quoted lines usually start with ">" or some other punctuation mark. Followups usually have the same Subject: line as the earlier article, but with "Re:" or ">" attached to the beginning if not already there. Sometimes a poster will change the subject for reasons of topicality (for instance, if a discussion of Sartre?s moral philosophy has drifted into a discussion of celebrity pizza toppings), but the ">" will still be displayed by the news reader to show that the article is in fact a followup.
hierarchy ? a topical or geographically separate set of newsgroups . For example, the sci hierarchy includes newsgroups about science and the triangle hierarchy includes newsgroups aimed at readers in the Triangle area. The most widely distributed hierarchies are those in the USENET hierarchies, known as the "Big 7" hierarchies. Some popular non-USENET hierarchies are gnu (discussion about the GNU Project and its software); bio (newsgroups pertaining to biology) and alt (virtually anything goes). These heirarchies often have sub-heirarchies; for example, the sci heirarchy about science includes a sub-heirarchy sci.math about mathematics which includes several newsgroups.
moderated ? a newsgroup that does not allow an article to be posted until a person designated as the moderator approves it. Cf. unmoderated .
netnews ? a facility that allows the reading of public messages, called articles, posted from around the world.
news reader ? a program that provides articles to the user in a functional and aesthetically pleasing way. If the articles are not stored locally on disk, the news reader may query another machine called a news server for the articles. The news reader also keeps track of what articles you have and have not read, so that each time you use the news reader you will not have to reread old articles. News readers are not to be confused with readers of news, i.e., the user.
news server ? a computer that holds articles on a local disk and makes them available to other users on the same or other machines using a news reader.
newsgroup ? a topical separate area on netnews . Newsgroups are delimited into hierarchies by periods; for example a newsgroup on the topic of symbolic math, which is a natural science, is called sci.math.symbolic .
post1 ? to write and place a new article on netnews . A poster may issue a followup to an earlier article or start a new thread on a different topic.
post2 ? another name for an article .
poster ? one who makes any type of post ; cf. lurker .
regional hierarchy ? a hierarchy of newsgroups distributed to a single geographical area. The ones affecting UNC are the unc hierarchy (available only on campus machines); the triangle hierarchy (for the Research Triangle area); and the nc hierarchy (for all of North Carolina).
reply ? a response to a poster of a news article through email. Replies are visible only to the recipient, just like any email. Just like followups , the sender may quote the recipient?s earlier lines and comment on them. Most news readers allow an easy method for sending replies.
thread ? a post and all its followups . In certain news readers such as trn , one can view a "tree" of the progression of a thread. Among users of netnews , the definition of thread sometimes varies: some consider a thread only articles with the same Subject: header, some only articles which are thematically related, and some consider any article with a common ancestor part of the same thread. News readers uses the final definition.
unmoderated ? a newsgroup that is unmoderated allows anyone to post , and does not have a moderator.
USENET ? a set of hierarchies available via netnews . Virtually all news servers carry these hierarchies, wherever in the world they may be. The USENET hierarchies, also known as the "Big 7," are comp , misc , news , rec , sci , soc and talk .
Document Overview
Tags: administer, create, design, listserv, manage, newsSubjects: Newsgroups
Genre: Tutorial
Audience: Everyone
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Copyright 2002-2007 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This
work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
