What Usenet groups are available?
The JANET Usenet News Service carries all the newsgroups widely available in the world (except for geographically limited hierarchies, naturally). Since this amounts to over a gigabyte of data per day, many sites who use the News Feed Service prefer to request a feed of only a subset of this. Some sites also limit the selection of newsgroups according to local policy on content. The main hierarchies which can be chosen are: • The “big 8” Usenet hierarchies: • comp: computing special-interest groups • humanities: discussion on the humanities • misc: miscellaneous groups • news: discussions about the operation of netnews • rec: recreational groups (hobbies and other pastimes) • sci: scientific groups • soc: social groups • talk: discussion groups, often of controversial issues • Other common hierarchies, which most sites take: • alt: “alternative” (and largely anarchical) discussions. Many sites choose to exclude the very high-bandwidth “alt.binaries” sub-hierarchy, if not the whole of a
