alt.* hierarchy

* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to occur in alt.*.

In practice, however, most newsgroups follow an informal procedure involving a public discussion in alt.config before being created.

This procedure is designed to help the potential creator better understand what factors contribute to a newsgroup's success.

Their effort to change the way newsgroups are organized led to objections from some vocal Usenet users.

In particular, there are many alt.fan newsgroups, mostly devoted to discussions of the work and life of famous people: writers, musicians, actors and athletes have alt.fan groups.

During the notorious trial of Karla Homolka, alt.fan.karla-homolka was created to get around the Canadian news blackout on the case.

Because of the inevitably lurid and sometimes offensive subjects that it would cover, newsgroup administrators objected to the inclusion of one or more newsgroups covering sexual topics in the Big Seven (including the existing rec.arts.erotica), fearing that they may prevent the major news hierarchies from being widely distributed.

Binaries are often of extremely large size, which is why administrators may choose to exclude them.

The language of preference in the "original" Usenet hierarchies, including alt.

*, is English, which implies that the preferred character set encoding for these newsgroups is ASCII.

In June 2008, it was announced that Sprint and Verizon would be cutting off access to the alt.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo claimed his office found child porn in 88 of the 100,000 groups that exist on alt.*.

In the same time frame, AT&T's United States–based consumer dial internet service provider decommissioned their NNTP servers entirely, citing a combination of the above concerns and a putative decline in traffic volume which had accelerated beyond a statistical point of no return.