Robert Hettinga writes:

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.

In theory, and according to the alt FAQ, anyone can create an alt group. In reality, control messages are merely advisory, and greater weight is lent to control messages which have the imprimatur of the Alt Cabal than to those issued by mere peons. The typical news admin finds that if he honors all rmgroup messages issued by Cabal members, when they disapprove of a newsgroup not previously discussed in alt.config, his life is made simpler, and he no longer has to weed the wheat from the chaf by hand. Since most people are inherently lazy, and most newgroups created outside of the alt.config process are trash, the path of least resistance is to only automatically honor newgroups and rmgroups issued by Cabal members. This is of course the exact antithesis of how alt was supposed to work in the first place, but with the large number of users on the Net at present, it is not practical to create every single newsgroup a person might want automatically. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"