Was wondering who came up with the dots in a newsgroup? Is it hard coded
and how do you prevent hierarchies from being taken over? Was wondering
why they never used colons dashes or even pound signs? Does a newsgroup
always have to have a dot in between it or does it always have to have
two or more levels in it? I'm really loving this tech way better than
web forums.

****Seth M 26 USA****

hurst <seth@home.sethhurst.com> writes:

> Was wondering who came up with the dots in a newsgroup?

I think it dates back to the original A News, so presumably Steve Daniel
and Tom Truscott back in 1980. (Small bit of trivia: there used to be a
distinction between the local newsgroup "general" and the distributed
newsgroup "NET.general", and the NET was in all caps.)

B News in 1981 introduced the current lowercase naming scheme, although
net.* (and, later, mod.*) were used for quite some time until the Great
Renaming.

> Is it hard coded and how do you prevent hierarchies from being taken
> over?

I don't know what "taken over" means here.

> Was wondering why they never used colons dashes or even pound signs?

I'm not sure why "NET." was picked as the prefix insead of some other
punctuation. A News predates DNS, so it's not by analogy for domain
names, I don't think. Maybe periods were just in the air.

> Does a newsgroup always have to have a dot in between it or does it
> always have to have two or more levels in it?

It doesn't have to have a dot. All news software that I'm aware of will
cope with newsgroup names with no periods in them. However, much of the
configuration for processing control messages and choosing which messages
to send to peers is based on hierarchies.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

On 8/9/22 20:30, Russ Allbery wrote:
> hurst <seth@home.sethhurst.com> writes:
>
>> Was wondering who came up with the dots in a newsgroup?
>
> I think it dates back to the original A News, so presumably Steve Daniel
> and Tom Truscott back in 1980. (Small bit of trivia: there used to be a
> distinction between the local newsgroup "general" and the distributed
> newsgroup "NET.general", and the NET was in all caps.)
>
> B News in 1981 introduced the current lowercase naming scheme, although
> net.* (and, later, mod.*) were used for quite some time until the Great
> Renaming.
>
>> Is it hard coded and how do you prevent hierarchies from being taken
>> over?
>
> I don't know what "taken over" means here.
>
>> Was wondering why they never used colons dashes or even pound signs?
>
> I'm not sure why "NET." was picked as the prefix insead of some other
> punctuation. A News predates DNS, so it's not by analogy for domain
> names, I don't think. Maybe periods were just in the air.
>
>> Does a newsgroup always have to have a dot in between it or does it
>> always have to have two or more levels in it?
>
> It doesn't have to have a dot. All news software that I'm aware of will
> cope with newsgroup names with no periods in them. However, much of the
> configuration for processing control messages and choosing which messages
> to send to peers is based on hierarchies.
>

Hey Russ just wanted to say I liked the little story you wrote on your
website. too bad there was only two chapters.