Who appointed Joel Furr ruler of alt.*?
No one. In fact, references to “King Joel of alt.*” are showing up a lot less frequently because Joel no longer gives much of a damn what happens in alt.* – so many garbage newsgroups have been created that the alt.* namespace is a hopeless mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it. He used to spend a half hour to an hour each day trying to explain to the endless legions of clueless newbies why we didn’t need to have sixteen newsgroups on the same subject, or why a newsgroup with a confusing, meaningless name would get zero traffic. It never made a dent in the hordes of stupid-ass bozos who showed up day after day begging for newsgroups only they cared about, so Joel eventually found better uses for his time.
