Hey, folks,
I thought all you had to do to create an alt.group was to have a news admin somewhere just make a group; send out a control message of somekind. I thought that alt groups didn't have to go through a charter, or voting process, or anything else. They just happened.
Then, everyone just has to tell their local news admin that they went to see it, or they can wait until their news admin sees it flying by, and adds it to the available groups list at his own discretion.
It's not like we want comp.cypherpunks or something, with a voting process, right?
It's not quite that simple. While a "Big 7" group requires CFD, charter and voting, once you pass tthose hurdles you're virtually guaranteed good propagation. alt has no "set" creartion procedure, but your group will not receive good propagation unless the powers that be "approve" of the idea. In this case, the people you have to convince are the news admins who must permit your control message to be honoured; time was most sites ran on autopilot, but joke and badly-named groups mean that most news admins now drop most newgroup messages on the floor. These people hang out in alt.config, and you should propose the group's creation there, followed by a couple of weeks of discussion, hopefully featuring many more supportive messages than non-supportive ones. After that, a newgroup message stands a much better chance.
Cheers, Bob Hettinga
Hip hip, John P. john@huiac.apana.org.au