And other useful links for anyone proposing their first news group.

Start here:

Some commonly-held (mis)assumptions about alt.* and alt.config

http://nylon.net/alt/barb.htm

Full FAQs:

The current favorite amongst alt.config regulars.

http://nylon.net/alt/

Two more excellent FAQs. Both unfortunately very out of date.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-creation-guide/
http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/good-newgroup.html

Tools and special purpose FAQs:

To check if a group already exists, construct a link from this template.

ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/[hierarchy]/[group.name].gz

Example:
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/alt/alt.books.jack-london.gz

Notes:

To validate a potential new newsgroup name, this tool written by Peter J Ross and now hosted here will check for many common problems.

http://groupsearch.alt-config.net/validator.html

To check propagation of your new group, this handy tool searches approximately fifty different news service providers at once.

http://groupsearch.alt-config.net/engine.html

If you are considering proposing a moderated news group, please read this FAQ first.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/mod-pitfalls.html

If you still think you want to go this route read both of these, then
re-read the first one!

http://pages.swcp.com/~dmckeon/mod-faq.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20060210104745/www.landfield.com/moderators/

Useful to proponents and a must read for future configers, a former maintainer of the ISC archives David "Tale" Lawrence discusses control messages.

ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/README

For proposals that belong in the UK hierarchy: Please go bug these dudes.

http://www.usenet.org.uk/

A page similar to this one with a few links I don't have.

http://nntp.aacity.net/

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