The Great Renaming was a restructuring of

Usenet newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start ...

s that took place in 1987. B News maintainer and

UUNET UUNET Technologies, Inc., formerly UUNET Communications Services, was an American commercial Internet service provider. Founded in 1987, it was one of the first and largest commercial ISPs and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in ...

founder Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming.

Motivation

The primary reason for the Great Renaming was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups. An alternative explanation was that

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

an networks refused to pay for some of the high-volume and low-content groups such as those regarding

religion Religion is a range of social system, social-cultural systems, including designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics in religion, ethics, or ...

and

racism Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one Race (human categorization), race or ethnicity over another. It may also me ...

; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups. The suggested category for the newsgroups less popular among European networks was ''talk.*''

History

Pre-renaming

Before the Renaming, the newsgroups were categorized into three hierarchies: ''fa.*'' for groups gatewayed from

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

, ''mod.*'' for moderated discussions, and ''net.*'' for unmoderated groups. Names of the groups were said to be rather haphazard. While reorganization discussions had occurred earlier, software limitations prevented the adoption of a consistent organizational scheme. Improvements introduced by Adams during 1986 with B News version 2.11 removed the requirement for moderated groups to use the "mod." prefix, allowed posting to moderated groups using newsreaders rather than separate

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

programs, and eliminated the flat storage method, which required that the first 14 characters of all newsgroups be unique. With this added flexibility and transparency, it became practical to perform the effort.

Renaming

The ''backbone providers'', ''the backbone cabal'', were instrumental in this reorganization of Usenet since they had great influence with respect to supporting a new newsgroup. Some suggest that members of the cabal had interests in bundling certain newsgroups into the ''talk.*'' hierarchy, so that they would not be objected to by their supervisors. These newsgroups were categorized into a series of

hierarchies A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an importan ...

, to make it easier for newsgroups to be created and distributed. The original hierarchies were ''comp.*'', ''misc.*'', ''news.*'', ''rec.*'', ''sci.*'', ''soc.*'', and ''talk.*''. These hierarchies, known collectively as the " Big Seven", were open and free for anyone to participate in (except for the moderated newsgroups), though they were subject to a few general rules governing their naming and distribution. Several other popular hierarchies remained on Usenet as well, such as the ''k12.*'' hierarchy, which covers topics especially relating to

education Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...

school A school is the educational institution (and, in the case of in-person learning, the Educational architecture, building) designed to provide learning environments for the teaching of students, usually under the direction of teachers. Most co ...

s, and

college A college (Latin: ''collegium'') may be a tertiary educational institution (sometimes awarding degrees), part of a collegiate university, an institution offering vocational education, a further education institution, or a secondary sc ...

Post-renaming

An additional hierarchy, '' alt.*'', was also created soon after the Renaming. The ''alt.*'' hierarchy was meant to be completely free from centralized control, and it was not subject to the formalities of the Big Seven. The prefix "alt" designated a hierarchy that is ''alternative'' to the ''mainstream'' (comp, misc, news, rec, soc, sci, talk) hierarchies. As free form discussion on alt.* contrasted with the more academic tending formal hierarchies, the "So You Want to Create an Alt Newsgroup" FAQ jokes that the name "alt" is an

acronym An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...

for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists", though this is actually just a humorous

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

. In April 1995, when Usenet traffic grew significantly, particularly in academia, the ''humanities.*'' hierarchy was introduced to better cover the additional kinds of topics being discussed, and with the seven hierarchies created by the Renaming, compose today's so-called " Big 8".

References