GROUP CREATION POLICIES
Last modified: 2008-09-14
(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.
For a friendlier view of the information in this directory, including
relevant log messages and recent changes, see:
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.
There are several legacy hierarchies that allow control messages from
anyone in a certain region, and two (alt.* and free.*) that allow
control messages from anyone. Given rampant abuse of this capability,
new hierarchies that allow anyone to send control messages will not be
added without extremely compelling justification. If the intention is
to create a hierarchy in which anyone in a particular region or with a
particular affiliation can create a group, we strongly recommend still
using a central control message sender with PGP-signed control messages
(possibly automated) and providing some way for people with the
appropriate affiliation to request that it add a new group. Otherwise,
the hierarchy is likely to fill with junk groups that will never be
used.
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.