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Hierarchies and Newsgroups

The Alternative Hierarchy

Because many people weren't happy with the way the BIG-8 system works, a Usenet administrator one day started the alternative groups (alternative to the BIG-8 groups). The story is more or less: He tried to create certain groups as BIG-8 groups, but the main Usenet backbone provider at this time refused to carry those groups (even so some of them DID pass the election), so he created them on his own and used an "alternative" backbone to distribute messages of those groups.

The alternative groups have only one hierarchy, alt.* and the rules are: There are no rules! Basically everyone can start a new group there or try to remove already existing ones. Because there is not centralized management of alt.*, most ISPs trust nobody there. IOW, you can send out a control message to create a new group and you will be ignored, just like you will be ignored if you try to remove an already existing group.

The idea of alt.*: If ISPs like a group, they are free to carry it, if they don't like it, they don't have to carry it. If they don't want to carry a group any longer, they can drop it without further notice. So the control over alt.* is a decentralized one and every ISP has as much suffrage as every other ISP carrying alt.* groups.

Because there are a lot of ISPs on the Net and because you never know the politics of each ISP, creating a new alt.* group is hard work, if you want to make sure that all ISPs will alter on carry the group. This is the reason why alt.* groups usually have a poorer distribution than BIG8 groups. Also the alt.* tree is a bit chaotic and there are plenty of duplicates (multiple Newsgroups about a single topic), making it impossible to unite all fans of a specific topic into one place.

Nevertheless, the most interesting groups are usually alt.* groups (at least for dicussion, if you need reasonable answers to your questions, you better try BIG8) and alt is also the hierarchy where you will find all the binary groups (alt.binaries.*).

In alt.* most posters use screen names instead of their real names, you should also uphold Usenet etiquette in alt.*, but most posters aren't as strict as BIG8 posters, meaning smaller etiquette violations are usually not punished. If you treat alt.* posters friendly, they will treat you friendly as well, but don't expect to get treated with respect.

The motto of alt.*: "You can do whatever you like as long as you don't bother other users with it."

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