Adding New Groups
Our policy is to follow the accepted procedures for each Usenet hierarchy for newsgroup creation and removal. We do not carry rogue newsgroups.
In the "Big 8" hierarchies (comp.*, rec.*, soc.*, misc.*, sci.*, news.*, talk.*, humanities.*) as well as in a number of regional and language-specific hierarchies, we automatically process PGP-signed control messages sent by the hierarchy maintainers. There is no need to request new groups in these hierarchies as they will be automatically carried on our servers as soon as they are created.
In alt.* and other hierarchies, you can request a newsgroup we do not carry by sending email to Support. We process requests manually, so they may take several days.
In other hierarchies we will try to determine whether the requested group is valid according to the accepted procedures for the hierarchy, and we will add the group if it is valid.
Microsoft does not send control messages for its microsoft.* newsgroups, despite the fact that they are propagated to the public Usenet feed. For these groups, we periodically synchronize our group list to the one on Microsoft's own server.
Some hierarchies are private for particular companies and are not propagated on the public feed. We are unable to carry such groups. No one can carry these hierarchies, but some servers add the groups anyway; in those cases, the groups will not contain the official traffic and posts made there will not be seen by the company or by the people reading the groups through the official server. Some of these hierarchies were once public, and therefore still exist on many Usenet servers, but they are still not valid Usenet groups; one significant example of this is the ibm.* hierarchy, which was made private some years ago.
Other examples of private, non-Usenet hierarchies that cannot be carried by us or by any Usenet service are adobe.*, macromedia.*, and gmane.*.
