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The Big 8 (previously the Big 7) are a group of newsgroup hierarchies established after the Great Renaming, a restructuring of Usenet that took place in 1987. These hierarchies are managed by the Big 8 Management Board.[1] Groups are added through a process of nomination, discussion and voting.[2]
The original seven hierarchies were comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.*. They were open and free for anyone to participate in (except for the moderated newsgroups), though they were subject to a few general rules governing their naming and distribution.
alt.* was not part of the original seven but created separately as a place with more freedom and fewer rules than the Big 7.
In April 1995,[3] when Usenet traffic grew significantly, humanities.* was introduced and it and the seven hierarchies created by the Renaming make up today's so-called "Big 8".
| Hierarchy | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| comp.* | Computer-related discussions | comp.software, comp.sys.amiga, comp.browsers.www |
| humanities.* | Humanities topics | humanities.music.composers.wagner |
| misc.* | Miscellaneous topics | misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids |
| news.* | Newsgroup-related matters. This hierarchy was not originally intended for reporting news events. It was meant to deal with matters of Usenet in particular | news.groups, news.admin, news.announce.groups |
| rec.* | Recreation and entertainment | rec.music, rec.arts.movies, rec.arts.poetry |
| sci.* | Science-related discussions | sci.physics, sci.research, sci.skeptic |
| soc.* | Social discussions | soc.college.org, soc.culture.African, soc.history.what-if |
| talk.* | Talk about various controversial topics and discussions with no obvious categorization | talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.bizarre, talk.origins |
The Big 8 Management Board was originally created in 2005 from former moderators of the news.announce.newgroups.[4] The board's mission is to:
- create well-named, well-used newsgroups in the Big-8 Usenet hierarchies;
- make necessary adjustments to existing groups;
- remove groups that are not well-used; and
- assist and encourages the support of a canonical Big-8 newsgroup list by Usenet sites.[5]
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