Why wasn the newsgroup renamed when Prince changed his name?
When he changed his name, it made sense to change the name of the newsgroup. Unfortunately, he chose a name that has no ASCII representation, and Usenet is still an ASCII world. There were other reasons for leaving alt.music.prince as is, one of them has also been mentioned by others: how would new fans/Usenet newbies find alt.music.O(+> or whatever (or alt.music.tafkap, as has also been suggested)? And probably the most overlooked reason for leaving alt.music.prince alone was purely technical: overwhelmingly, most systems carrying Usenet news are UNIX systems; some of the characters often used to represent the symbol have special meaning to UNIX and should never be used as part of a newsgroup name (or any other file/directory name). Of course, now that he’s once again calling himself Prince, the issue is moot.
