The "So You Want to Create an Alt Newsgroup" FAQ repeats a common joke that the name "alt" is an acronym for "Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists". The prefix "alt" refers to the fact that it is a "hierarchy that is 'alternative' to the 'mainstream' (comp, misc, news, rec, soc, sci and talk) hierarchies". The first newsgroup on alt hierarchy was his alt.gourmand.
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It would be a network without the backbones, thereby free from backbones' influences on creating or not creating a new newsgroup. The alt.* hierarchy was suggested as an alternative to talk.* by Brian Reid.
In particular, the creation of the talk.* hierarchy for discussions of controversial or sensitive issues by the renaming did not go well. Their effort to change the way newsgroups are organized led to objections from some vocal Usenet users. The "backbone carriers", or the backbone cabal as they have been referred to by some users of the Usenet, were vital hubs in the distribution chain of most of the newsgroup postings. The birth of the alt.* hierarchy is tied to a drastic transformation of the Usenet, the Great Renaming of 1987. News group removal in theory occurs in much the same way as newsgroup creation, however as a matter of practice most news administrators do not remove newsgroups. As a result, groups that do not follow this procedure are usually not well-propagated. It is up to each individual news administrator whether to add a new newsgroup, and some will not do so if the group has not been discussed in alt.config. This procedure is designed to help the potential creator better understand what factors contribute to a newsgroup's success. In practice, however, most newsgroups follow an informal procedure involving a public discussion in alt.config before being created.
Unlike most of the other hierarchies, there is no centralized control of the hierarchy and anyone who is technically capable of creating a newsgroup can do so. The alt.* hierarchy was created by John Gilmore and Brian Reid. The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to occur in alt.*. The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with " alt.", organized hierarchically. October 2020 screenshot showing 60 PB of usenet group data.
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