Was wondering who came up with the dots in a newsgroup?
Is it hard coded and how do you prevent hierarchies from being taken
over?
Was wondering why they never used colons dashes or even pound signs?
Does a newsgroup always have to have a dot in between it or does it
always have to have two or more levels in it?
hurst <seth@home.sethhurst.com> writes:
Was wondering who came up with the dots in a newsgroup?
I think it dates back to the original A News, so presumably Steve Daniel
and Tom Truscott back in 1980. (Small bit of trivia: there used to be a distinction between the local newsgroup "general" and the distributed newsgroup "NET.general", and the NET was in all caps.)
B News in 1981 introduced the current lowercase naming scheme, although
net.* (and, later, mod.*) were used for quite some time until the Great Renaming.
Is it hard coded and how do you prevent hierarchies from being taken
over?
I don't know what "taken over" means here.
Was wondering why they never used colons dashes or even pound signs?
I'm not sure why "NET." was picked as the prefix insead of some other punctuation. A News predates DNS, so it's not by analogy for domain
names, I don't think. Maybe periods were just in the air.
Does a newsgroup always have to have a dot in between it or does it
always have to have two or more levels in it?
It doesn't have to have a dot. All news software that I'm aware of will
cope with newsgroup names with no periods in them. However, much of the configuration for processing control messages and choosing which messages
to send to peers is based on hierarchies.
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 300 |
Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
Uptime: | 66:48:45 |
Calls: | 6,712 |
Files: | 12,244 |
Messages: | 5,356,315 |