It is not difficult to start a new Usenet newsgroup, provided
it passed the voting procedure.
This is an excerpt from the Aug 93 Usenet readership statistics
  +-- Recent traffic (messages per month)
  |      +-- Recent traffic (kilobytes per month)
  |      |    +-- Crossposting percentage
  |      |    |   +-- Share: % of newsrders
  V      V    V   V
2207  4770.2  1% 2.1%  rec.pets.dogs
 365   613.2 10% 1.9%  rec.pets
2103  3872.9  8% 1.8%  rec.pets.cats
 592  1088.7  1% 0.8%  rec.pets.birds
 589   951.5  1% 0.7%  rec.pets.herp
 
As we can see, the total traffic on rec.pets isn't even as much
as that of the smallest sub-group, which means that the likelyhood
of getting a rec.pets.ferrets to pass a vote small. To pass, a
group must receive at least 100 more Yes than No votes, and the
Yes votes must be more than 2/3 of all votes. As not everyone
on this list is on Usenet, I don't think it will happen.
 
And I don't think it's needed. I've created a "virtual rec.pets.ferrets"
for myself by putting this line in my ~.nn/kill file:
rec.pets:~+s:ferret
So I never see any posts that don't have "ferret" in the subject
line.  Which of course only works if your newsreader is nn, but I
think the same possibility exists in others too.
--
 Urban Fredriksson  [log in to unmask]
 
[Posted in FML issue 0656]