ARCHIVED: What are some of the more important Usenet hierarchies?
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 carryalt
, 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
This is document ahfb in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-09-22 17:11:50.