GROUP CREATION POLICIES Last modified: 2007-07-19 (This document was originally written by David Lawrence, but has since been updated and is currently maintained by Russ Allbery. For all matters concerning this archive, please contact usenet-config@isc.org.) This document describes the policies by which the active and newsgroups files in this directory are maintained. It describes first the addition and removal of groups in hierarchies that are covered, and then discusses what happens when we become aware of a new hierarchy via a newgroup control message. This archive updates hourly, and due to delays in propagation, it can take somewhat longer for control messages to be acted on. If the control message was posted from a well-connected site, allow about two hours for its effects to be reflected in the active and newsgroups files. The intention is for the active and newsgroups files here to be complete for all publicly available hierarchies. To that end, we appreciate when discrepancies with other authoritative lists are pointed out. Please send mail to usenet-config@isc.org if you have such a discrepancy to point out. Given the volume of Usenet control messages and the number of hierarchies publicly available, some intentional, some not, it is unlikely that we'll be able to keep up with all new public hierarchies without help. If you know of or are involved with a public newsgroup hierarchy that is not listed in control.ctl in this directory, please send a note to usenet-config@isc.org containing the details. You may also want to look at: This message refers to "newgroup" and "rmgroup" control messages, which are special types of Usenet articles that add and remove groups, respectively. Usage of this terminology implicitly includes "checkgroups", another type of special Usenet article that compares an entire list of groups with those carried by a server. It also includes maintenance that we do in response to messages received not via the normal Usenet control messages, such as from a web site or through email. This document is expected to remain fairly static. The canonical list of hierarchies for which information is currently known can be found in the file control.ctl in this same directory. For documentation on its format, see the control.ctl(5) man page that comes with INN. A copy is available on the web at: HIERARCHY MAINTENANCE Where a central authority nominally exists for a hierarchy, I honor the newgroups and rmgroups issued by that authority. For example, the group additions and removals done by Ed Hew for biz.*, or UK Control for uk.*, or Marco d'Itri for linux.*, are honored here as definitive. You can see which email addresses are honored by looking at the control.ctl file in this directory, fully known as: Where no nominal authority exists for a hierarchy, the list of groups carried in that hierarchy were generally taken from whatever the generally agreed-upon set was, and are currently static. (alt.* and free.* are exceptions; see below.) We are willing but reluctant to change the list of groups on a manual basis if those changes are similarly generally agreed-upon by the users of that hierarchy. However, it is far better, if a hierarchy without a current authority needs changes, for someone to step up and volunteer to be that authority and issue real control messages for the hierarchy. The "alt" and "free" hierarchies are special cases. In each hierarchy, all properly formatted newgroups (see below) are automatically executed, and all rmgroups are ignored. No manual changes will be made in either hierarchy except under very special circumstances, and will require substantial justification. Similarly, the moderation status and description of the newsgroup will be set to whatever was present in the last control message for that group. All newsgroup names consist of components, which are the elements of the name between the dots. For example, "news.announce.newgroups" has three components, "news", "announce" and "newgroups. No groups will be added that do not conform to the following standard for Usenet groups: - a component must not contain characters other than [a-z0-9+_-] - a component must contain at least one non-digit - a component must not contain uppercase letters - a component must begin with a letter or digit - sequences 'all' and 'ctl' must not be used as components - the name must have at least two components - the first component must begin with a letter - the first component must not be "control", "to", or "example". Those criteria are based on rules written by Henry Spencer for the Son-of-1036 draft standard and included in the current USEFOR draft. At this time, only pure ASCII newsgroup names are accepted. Unicode newsgroup names will be considered should they ever be standardized. There is an additional criteria that is also taken from the current USEFOR draft, but which is still a matter of some debate -- the limit on the length of a component. The de facto limit was 14 octets for over a decade and a half. It is currently proposed that this be lifted to a "soft" limit of 30 octets (in other words, this limit is recommended but not required). This limit is currently enforced. Entire newsgroup names are limited to 80 characters, rather than the soft limit of 72 characters proposed by the standard, because two existing non-joke groups have names longer than 72 characters. In addition, to be automatically processed, control messages must be properly formatted Usenet messages containing an Approved header and a syntactically valid Control header. "checkgroups" control messages must be no more than 256KB in size, and "newgroup" and "rmgroup" messages must be no more than 64KB in size. "newgroup" control messages must contain a valid newsgroup description for the created newsgroup, which means there must be a line in the body reading, exactly: For your newsgroups file: with no leading whitespace, followed on the next line by a valid description line for the newsgroup (see THE NEWSGROUPS FILE for a discussion of the format of this line). This description must not contain any control characters (octets between 0x00 and 0x1F). The newsgroup descriptions in the newsgroups file are taken from the most recent control message for that group, whether a valid "newgroup" or "checkgroups" message. NEW HIERARCHIES If you are the maintainer for a hierarchy that is not already present in the control.ctl file in this directory, we strongly recommend reading the Usenet Hierarchies FAQ at: which contains information about how to have your hierarchy added to these newsgroup lists as well as how to make it easier for other sites to add your hierarchy. Briefly, please mail usenet-config@isc.org a valid control.ctl entry for your hierarchy, and if it already has existing newsgroups, please also send a pointer to the hierarchy web site with a list of newsgroups in checkgroups format or include that list in the mail message. We also strongly recommend sending PGP-signed control messages for all changes to the newsgroup list, and sending PGP-signed checkgroups messages monthly for the entire hierarchy. If you are using PGP to sign your control messages, you also need to send us the public key or a pointer to where it can be found. THE NEWSGROUPS FILE The newsgroups file is maintained by using the "For your newsgroups file:" lines from the individual newgroups that make each group, or by the entire list provided in a checkgroups message. As far as the format of the newsgroups file is concerned, there's a preferred format for each line. Unfortunately, we do not have the time to fix up the lines that are being automatically included from newgroup messages. This information is provided so that control message senders can craft better control messages. Here's what should be included for each line: group.namedescription[ (Moderated)] There should be at least one hard tab (assume 8 column tab stops) between the group name and the description. If the group name is at least 16 characters, follow it with one tab. If the group name is at least 8 characters, follow it with two tabs. In the unlikely event the group name is less than 8 characters, follow it with three tabs. The total line length should be at most 79 columns. The description should start with a capital and not be more than 55 characters (79 - 24) long. If the group name is longer than 24 characters, the description should be correspondingly shorter. If the group is moderated, it should have " (Moderated)" at the very end of the description, not counted as part of the length of the description. This text must be exactly that, with no variations, as it is used by news software to find moderated groups. Traditionally, all newsgroup descriptions ended with a period, but this isn't necessary and steals away one character that is occasionally useful for forming a better description. Some over-long descriptions could be made to easily fit the length by dropping "puff" phrases like "Discussion of" which don't meaningfully contribute to the description. Others are usually pretty easy to get to no more than column eighty, except when the group names start getting really long. Hopefully then the group name itself contains quite a bit of description. In some cases, a longer description really will be necessary, and the software maintaining this newsgroups file will not reject longer descriptions. They may, however, be less readable and less useful for some Usenet users. Be very careful that your news client or other software that you use to post the control message does not wrap the description line. If it does, any text that's wrapped will be ignored by most servers and will not be included in the description. There is, at present, no good mechanism for managing the character set of the newsgroup descriptions. Many non-English hierarchies include newsgroup descriptions in their native languages, since this is more useful for their users, and those are included verbatim in this newsgroups file. This unfortunately means that different lines of the file will require different character set settings to read properly, and those character sets are not documented in the file. Hopefully some future standard will provide a way to address this; in the meantime, using UTF-8 for non-ASCII characters is recommended. LOGGING Each action taken on the active group list, and each processed Usenet control message, is logged in the log files at: The log files are by year and month when the control message was processed, and each log entry is time stamped. All times are in UTC. Lines beginning with ACTION represent a change in the active and newsgroups files, and lines beginning with a message ID in angle brackets describe the disposition of a control message. The ACTION lines are: ACTION: newgroup New newsgroup added. ACTION: changegroup Moderation status of newsgroup changed. ACTION: changedesc Description of newsgroup changed. ACTION: rmgroup Newsgroup removed. Other lines can help if you're attempting to determine what happened to a particular control message. If it was not archived, it will be mentioned in the logs with some error message (assuming it reached us at all). If there is a log message stating that it has been processed, that means that it was received, was valid, and was recognized by a rule in control.ctl, but resulted in no change to the active and newsgroups files. Control messages that have no error message but also have no log entry indicating they were processed did not match any rule in control.ctl. Archived messages are added to the control message archive at: See: for more details on the archive policy.