Article 33729 of news.admin.misc: From: LSBUMGAR@vax1.acs.jmu.edu (lee s. bumgarner) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.culture.usenet,news.admin.misc Subject: A Short History of the Great Renaming, Alpha release. Date: 22 Feb 1995 20:35:40 GMT Organization: The Second Foundation This is an alpha release. Any and *all* changes, corrections etc are more than welcome. I am hoping that this story might jog the memory of some people around during the Great Renaming. (I am hoping I may have the honor of placing the finial copy in news.answers) lee s. bumgarner Since the collective memory of Usenet is something like two weeks, it is rare for an event to be of such signficance to Usenet that it be referred to a month later, much less nearly ten years later. Yet such is the case with the Great Renaming, which took place in 1986. "The growth of Usenet prompted it. The original scheme of just three worldwide hierarchies --net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.* for moderated groups and fa.* for gatewayed groups --- and the fairly haphazard way in which new names were developed was difficult to administer, " David Lawrence, (tale@uunet.uu.net) writes. Due to Usenet's growth, not only was it becoming difficult to figure out what they were looking for, but increasing number of readers were posting their articles to the wrong newsgroup, Lawrence wrote. Yet according to Lawrence, it was site administrators who were having the most problems. It was becoming more difficult for those who wanted only partial feed to maintaining their subscription files, "and the hierarchal aspect of the namespace was meant in no small part to make the desired feeding of groups more easy to accomplish," he said. Edwin Wiles a spectator of the event, (Edwin_Wiles@vienna.itd.sterling.com), agrees, writing that eventually things came to a head. "It [Usenet] was taking far too much time, and causing far too much trouble. So, various people started communicating on "what do we do about this mess?!?!'" So the process began, although not without some difficulty. "A great deal of this was done in open newsgroups that anyone could have read, had they wanted to. However, most people being more interested in getting on with their lives, weren't paying any attention. Only those who were being hurt by the situation were attempting to solve the problem," he said. Eventually, plans for the Great Renaming were announce in newsgroups outside those that had been discussing it, Wiles said. "People who hadn't been paying attention to what was going on in open forum suddenly started screaming 'Who are these people and just where do they get off telling ME what MY newsgroups are going to be called!?'" he said. Wiles said once the initial shock wore off, however, most people began to read the various articles explain why the proposals had been made, and they realized that it was indeed time for a change. Yet, as is usual with Usenet, not everyone was convinced. According to Wiles, The "alt.*" hierarchy was created because at least one creaming fanatic... who would not listen to anything approaching reason." The point of the "alt.*" hierarchy would be that there would be *no* controls *whatsoever* "on newsgroup creation, removal, renaming, moderation, unmoderation, whatever... A total free-for-all," he said. The "Big Seven" hierarchies, on the other hand, Wiles said, would have an agreed upon procedure for proposing, discussing, and voting on the creation of new newsgroups. Wiles said it may be time yet again for change. "Over the last few years, I've been rather amused to see the "alt."people saying the same things that were being said about the whole of Usenet before the "great renaming." "[It is] kind of neat to see [the] former rant-n-ravers [talk] about a Backbone Cabal (which never existed except in paranoid delusions brought about by failure to pay attention to reality), form themselves into the same sort of Cabal that they claimed existed way back when... ##30## _____________________________________ lsbumgar@jmu.edu * Boot up, log in, nerd out * no, I can't spell -------------------------------------- Article 25484 of news.admin.policy: Newsgroups: news.admin.policy,alt.fan.john-palmer From: red@redpoll.mrfs.oh.us (Richard E. Depew) Subject: Re: eskimo.com is being UDP'd by some German sites Organization: Home, in Munroe Falls, OH Date: Wed, 22 Feb 1995 02:44:22 GMT In article <1734CF287.C96@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>, wrote: >In article >twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu (Tim Pierce) writes: > >>My recollection of the term "UDP" is that it was established >>during the ARMM affair, and was originally intended to mean >>the aliasing solution. > >The term and the tool were well alive before ARMM and Richard Depew; >I remember that Karl Kleinpaste referred to it a couple of times. >I don't know whether Karl invented it (didn't he call it the Usenet >Fire Extinguisher synonymously at that time?). You've got the timing right. The concept and terminology of the Usenet Death Penalty was introduced by Eliot Lear and first reduced to a working program (in response to postings from John Palmer to moderated groups with forged approval headers, but never used against him) by Karl Kleinpaste. This was years before ARMM. I think the "fire extinguisher" was blocking a user from Karl's anonymous server, but I could be wrong on that. The "fire extinguisher" was contemporaneous with ARMM. I invented my own UDP, the Ultimate Depew Penalty, and I *did* apply it to JPP... I removed his name from my Christmas Card List. :-) Best wishes, Dick -- Richard E. Depew, Munroe Falls, OH red@redpoll.mrfs.oh.us (home) ``Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.'' Old saying Article 34295 of news.admin.misc: From: jbuck@synopsys.com (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.culture.usenet,news.admin.misc Subject: Re: A History of the Great Renaming, V .2 Date: 1 Mar 1995 18:52:05 GMT Organization: Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, CA 94043-4033 LSBUMGAR@vax1.acs.jmu.edu (lee s. bumgarner) writes: >Since the collective memory of Usenet is something like two weeks, it is >rare for an event to be of such signficance to Usenet that it be refered to >a month later, much less nearly ten years later. Yet such is the case with >the Great Renaming, which took place in 1986. What you've missed in your history is the personalities involved, hence your article is written almost entirely in the passive voice. The main person to force the Great Renaming through was Rick Adams, then the administrator of the most important site on the net, "seismo", at the Center for Seismic Studies in northern Virginia (Rick later went on to found UUNET). It had more UUCP connections than any other site at the time (the once famous "ihnp4" had become less imporant by this time). At the time, UUCP was the main propagation mechanism for Usenet. seismo was the only link between the US and Europe (a machine named "mcvax" was at the other end of this critical link). Rick Adams also was the chief maintainer for "B News", the standard news software of the time. Transmitting the news was quite expensive even though the volume was about 1/100 of what it is now, and the Europeans didn't want to pay for all the fluff groups like net.religion, net.flame, etc. Maintaining the configuration files to separate out the fluff groups from the techie groups was taking too much of Rick's time, and he got pissed off. He proposed to create a "talk" hierarchy for the high-flame-content groups (roughly the groups that are in "talk" today). The idea was that he could simply put "!talk" in the configuration file for each connected site that didn't want these groups. When there was resistance to this idea, he threatened to take his ball and go home, cutting off the hundreds of sites that were getting a free feed. (In those days the notion of a service provider that you could pay to get you a Usenet feed did not exist). The "backbone cabal", a mailing list of administrators of the principal sites (those paying the big long-distance telephone bills and moving lots of news articles around) wound up designing the current seven-part structure. This structure was imposed by fiat, with almost no input from those outside the list (although some adjustments were made in response to certain vociferous complaints). Some groups were moved from "talk" to "soc", since it was widely understood that if your group wound up in "talk" a lot of sites weren't going to carry it. >According to Wiles, the "alt.*" hierarchy was created "to pacify one >segment of the net.community who would not tolerate the idea that there >would be any sort of external control over ``their'' newsfeed. False. "alt" was not created to pacify anyone; it was created by dissidents from the original process. The two people responsible for the creation of "alt" were Brian Reid and John Gilmore. Brian Reid got pissed off because, in a bizarre move, the Backbone Cabal dropped his recipes group out of existence in the re-organization (I still don't know why). net.flame was also dropped in the Great Renaming. John Gilmore, a strong libertarian who ran his own site, objected to the censorship. The backbone cabal also refused to create soc.sex even though it won the vote, or to permit a "drugs" group. The original alt groups were: alt.sex alt.drugs alt.flame alt.gourmand alt.config Initially the major backbone sites didn't carry alt, except for decwrl, Brian's site. Later on, it spread. When Rick Adams converted seismo into uunet and turned it into a pay site, he made all groups (including alt) available, which certainly aided their spread. -- -- Joe Buck (not speaking for Synopsys, Inc) Phone: +1 415 694 1729