B News maintainer and UUNET founder Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming.
The primary reason for the Great Renaming was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups.
[1] An alternative explanation was that European networks refused to pay for some of the high-volume and low-content groups such as those regarding religion and racism; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups.
[4] While reorganization discussions had occurred earlier, software limitations prevented the adoption of a consistent organizational scheme.
Improvements introduced by Adams during 1986 with B News version 2.11 removed the requirement for moderated groups to use the "mod."
prefix, allowed posting to moderated groups using newsreaders rather than separate e-mail programs, and eliminated the flat storage method, which required that the first 14 characters of all newsgroups be unique.
These hierarchies, known collectively as the "Big Seven", 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.