The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. The primary reason was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups. [1] An alternative explanation was that European networks refused to pay for some of the discussion-intensive groups regarding religion and racism; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups. [2], [3] The suggested category for the newsgroups less popular among European networks was talk.* In either account, B News maintainer and UUNET founder Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming. Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... A newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Europe is conventionally considered one of the seven continents which, in this case, is more a cultural and political distinction than a physiogeographic one. ... An African-American man drinks out of the colored only water fountain at a racially segregated streetcar terminal in the United States in 1939. ... B News was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton as a replacement for A News. ... UUNET Technologies Logo Post-WorldCom UUNET Logo UUNET is one of the industrys oldest and largest Internet Service Providers. ... There have been at least two notable Rick Adams: For the internet pioneer see Rick Adams (internet pioneer) For the British television presenter see Rick Adams (television presenter) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

Before the renaming, the newsgroups were categorized into three hierarchies: fa.* for groups gatewayed from ARPANET, mod.* for moderated discussions, and net.* for unmoderated groups. Names of the groups were said to be rather haphazard (see The Great Renaming FAQ). ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... On Internet websites which invite users to post comments, a moderation system is the method the webmaster chooses to sort contributions which are irrelevant, obscene, illegal or insulting from contributions which are useful or informative. ...

While reorganization discussions had taken place earlier, software limitations prevented the adoption of a consistent organization scheme. Improvements introduced by Adams in 1986 with B News version 2.11 removed the requirement for moderated groups to use the "mod." prefix, allowed posting to moderated groups using newsreaders rather than separate e-mail programs, and eliminated the flat storage method, which required that the first 14 characters of all newsgroups be unique. With this added flexibility and transparency, it became practical to undertake the effort. 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... B News was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton as a replacement for A News. ... A Newsreader is as a person that represents a radio or tv show. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...

The backbone providers, "the backbone cabal," were instrumental in this reorganization of Usenet since they had a great influence with respect to supporting a new newsgroup. Some suggest that members of the cabal had interests in bundling certain newsgroups into the talk.* hierarchy, so that they would not be objected to by their supervisors. [4] The backbone cabal was a group (or cabal) of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s. ...

A more detailed account of reasons behind the Renaming can also be seen in a Usenet article posted by Gene Spafford at net.news and net.news.group. Eugene H. Spafford (born 1956) (known colloquially as Spaf) is a professor of computer science at Purdue University and a leading computer security expert. ...

These newsgroups were categorized into a series of hierarchies, to make it easier for newsgroups to be created and distributed. The original hierarchies, were: comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*. For the various types of hierarchy, see hierarchy (disambiguation) A hierarchy (in Greek: Ιεραρχία, it is derived from ιερός-hieros, sacred, and άρχω-arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is subordinate to a single other element. ...

These hierarchies, known collectively as the "Big Seven," were open and free for anyone to participate in (except for the moderated newsgroups), though they were subject to a few general rules governing their naming and distribution.

Several other popular hierarchies remained on Usenet as well, such as the k12.* hierarchy, which covers topics especially relating to education, schools, and colleges. American high school students in a school A school is most commonly a place designated for learning. ... The term college (Latin collegium) is most often used today to denote an educational institution. ...

An additional hierarchy, alt.*, was also created shortly after the Renaming. The term alt was originally simply meant to mean "alternative" but was popularly taken to stand for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists". The alt.* hierarchy was meant to be completely free from centralized control, and it was not subject to the formalities of the Big Seven. The hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with , organized hierarchically. ... Anarchism is a generic term describing various political philosophies and social movements that advocate the elimination of hierarchy and imposed authority. ... A lunatic (colloquially: loony) is commonly used term for a person who is mentally ill, dangerous, foolish or unpredictable, a condition once called lunacy. ... Terrorism is the unconventional use of violence for political gain. ...

In the mid-1990s, when the Usenet traffic grew significantly, one more hierarchy, humanities.*, was introduced, and with the seven hierarchies created by the Renaming, comprises today's so-called "Big 8." The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive, the last decade of the 20th Century. ... The Big 8 were, in the 1970s, a group of Americas international accountancy firms that handled the vast majority of audits for publicly traded corporations. ...

Hierarchies