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]