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Also known as: alt, alt hierarchy
Created in 1987 as a deliberate escape from Big 8 procedure. Anyone can issue a newgroup control message for an alt.* group, and each administrator decides independently whether to honor it, so the namespace is enormous, uneven, and littered with groups that never carried a single post. Because no vote stood in the way, binary distribution settled here, almost entirely under alt.binaries.*.
Browse all terms in Core Usenet Concepts, or see the full Usenet glossary.