"QLW" wrote in message
...

So how is a new news group formed?

Well, it is a lot of work and frustration, but it isn't rocket science and
it doesn't take any specific qualifications.

I was part of the committee that formed rec.boats.sailing and
rec.boats.cruising some ten years ago. The basic proceedure is that you put
together a proposal for a new group and then post the proposal in several
different spots as a "request for discussion", or RFD. I think the reqired
groups are "news.groups" and any existing newsgroups that have similar
discussions (such as rec.boats).

This will, of course, create tons of controversy and you may decide to
change the proposal, which will start the process over. Eventually, you
will get tired of the whining and bitching and just go foward with what you
currently have.

The next step is to have a vote. Before you can have a vote, you need to get
an "advocate" from the main usenet guru people, and that can take a while.
The advocate is the guy who actually tallies the votes and decides YES or NO
on the creation of the group.

Now, here is the frustrating part: you will get a LOT of people who vote NO,
so you have to make sure that you get enough people to vote YES to override
it. People will vote NO who have never in their life owned a boat and have
never read rec.boats. There will be hundreds of them!


To bad we can't make this one moderated to limit the
content to boating related topics.

As soon as you attempt to make it a moderated group, then there will be
LOTs more NO votes you have to counter. You will also need to really think
hard about the moderators. Most of the moderated groups fail because the
moderators get tired of dealing with it, or the users get fed up with the
moderator.

What does work fairly well is to have a "bot" do the moderating. A common
bot moderation is to reject any posting that was cross posted to more than
"n" groups, contains certain key words (like "viagra") or was from a list of
banned sources.

Creating a new group can be done, but it will take 6 months or so and
someone will have a lot of work ahead of themselves.

Rod McInnis