Usenet II was a proposed alternative to the classic

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

hierarchy 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 important ...

, started in 1998. Unlike the original Usenet, it was peered only between "sound sites" and employed a system of rules to keep out spam. Usenet II was backed by influential Usenetters like Russ Allbery. Sometime between 2010 and 2011, the web page for Usenet II went offline. The newsgroup hierarchy in Usenet II revived the old naming system used by Usenet before the

Great Renaming The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. B News maintainer and UUNET founder Rick Adams (Internet pioneer), Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming. Motivation The primar ...

. All groups had names starting "net.", which serve to distinguish them from the " Big 8" (misc.*, sci.*, news.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, comp.*, humanities.*). A separate checkgroup system, using the same technical mechanism as the one produced by David C. Lawrence for the Big 8, enforced the Usenet II hierarchy and prevents the creation of unauthorized newsgroups within it. The basic principles of operation were controlled by a ''Steering Committee'', which appointed "hierarchy czars" who were responsible for the content of specific portions of the namespace, or hierarchies. Usenet II had strictly enforced rules. Readers of messages in Usenet II had to be fully compliant with the RFC 1036 (Usenet) standard plus some additional format compliance rules that were specific to Usenet II. A message header had to contain a valid email address in the From field. It was required to have an

NNTP The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Univ ...

-Posting-Host header field containing a sound site. The distribution field was to be set to "4gh" (a reference to ''

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'' by

John Brunner John Brunner may refer to: * Sir John Brunner, 1st Baronet (1842–1919), British industrialist and Liberal Member of Parliament * John L. Brunner (1929–1980), Pennsylvania politician * Sir John Brunner, 2nd Baronet (1865–1929), British Liberal ...

). If the Subject field started with "Re:", indicating a follow-up, there had to be a valid "References" field that contained the

Message-ID Message-ID is a unique identifier for a digital message, most commonly a globally unique identifier used in email and Usenet newsgroups. Message-IDs are required to have a specific format which is a subset of an email address An email address ide ...

of a previous message.

Crosspost Crossposting is the act of posting the same message to multiple information channels; forums, mailing lists, or newsgroups. This is distinct from multiposting, which is the posting of separate identical messages, individually, to each channel, ( ...

s to groups outside the net.* hierarchy were cancelled automatically. No message were allowed to spawn a discussion in more than three newsgroups. This applied both to the "newsgroups" field and the "Followup-To" field. It was permissible to post the same message three times. Posting the same message every day or every week was not permitted. The effort to extend Usenet II was abandoned as technical means to fight spam and other abuse on traditional Usenet became more effective and spammers migrated from Usenet to email.

References

{{Reflist
Usenet II on Google Groups

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HotWired ''Hotwired'' (1994–1999) was the first commercial online magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of the print magazine ''Wired'', ''Hotwired'' carried original content. History Andrew Anker, Wired's then Vice Pres ...

story, February 26, 1998
"Usenet II Urges Netizens to Come On In"
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story, April 2, 1998 Usenet Computer-related introductions in 1998

See also

References