ARCHIVED: What are some of the more important Usenet hierarchies?

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The Big Eight mainstream hierarchies

Organized and well-established, these groups are available from most Usenet news servers:

comp: Anything related to computers (e.g., programming languages, operating systems, hardware)
humanities: Art, music, literature, philosophy, classical studies, etc.
misc: An assortment of topics that don't fit in any of the other Big Eight hierarchies
news: Pertaining to the administration and discussion of Usenet software, protocols, policies, etc.
rec: Recreation and hobbies of all kinds
sci: Academic discussions of science and, to a lesser extent, technology
soc: History, culture, religion, politics, lifestyle, and other topics of social interest
talk: Debate and extended discussion, often heated

Alternative hierarchies

With smaller distributions than their mainstream cousins, each of these hierarchies has its own rules and focus:

alt: This is by far the largest and most diverse hierarchy; all manner of topics can be found here. As there is no formal newsgroup creation procedure, anyone may create an alt group at any time. For this reason, many news servers either do not carry alt, or subscribe to only a small portion of its groups.
biz: Almost as well established as the Big Eight groups, biz caters to a variety of business interests.
clari: Requiring a license fee, the clari groups form a Usenet newspaper of sorts. All groups are moderated, with all articles posted by ClariNews.
k12: This hierarchy contains groups designed for K-12 educators.
microsoft: Microsoft distributes a large number of groups devoted to the discussion of its technology and products.
vmsnet: This hierarchy contains groups dedicated to the discussion of issues related to VMS.

Local groups

Note: UITS has retired the Indiana University Usenet servers (news.indiana.edu, news.iu.edu, and usenet.ucs.indiana.edu). As a result, you can no longer access Usenet newsgroups from these servers. Also, local (IU) newsgroups are no longer available.

More information

There are also numerous national, regional, local, and organizational hierarchies, some of which are available globally (e.g., the chi groups for Chicago, the relcom Russian language groups, and the British uk hierarchy).

For a list of all Usenet newsgroup hierarchies, visit:

  http://www.magmacom.com/~leisen/mlnh/

For more information about Usenet hierarchies, visit:

  http://www.ibiblio.org/usenet-i/hier-s/top.html