Hierarchies and Newsgroups

First we will take a look at the different hierarchies that exist on Usenet. This is important, because there are often multiple Newsgroups for a single topic, each in another hierarchy. While the topic of those groups is always the same, the fact that they are in different hierarchies has indirectly an influence on the group and the kind of posts you will find there. Later we will take a look at a list of assorted Newsgroups.

• The BIG-8 Hierarchies
• The Alternative Hierarchy
• The Free Hierarchy
• The Usenet2 Hierarchy
• Other Hierarchies

Links

The following links are not hosted on TGOS.org and will open inside a new window.

Use the WWW search pages of the following services to look what groups they are offering to their customers and to find if a group about a certain topic exists somewhere on the Usenet:

- AirNews
- Google
- Newscene
- Randori
- SuperNews

Other services that don't offer you such search engines, offer you to download a list of all NGs available on their servers:

- Altopia
The format is .gz, a format that is often used for Unix and Linux archives. Some Windows applications can decompress this format as well (e.g. WinZIP).

- ISC.org
The format is .gz, just like above. Use GZIP or WinZIP to decompress it.

- Newsguy
Uncompressed, plain text format.

If you want the most complete list of NGs that ever were created, search the ISC archive:

- ISC Archive (FTP Link)
The groups are sorted into sub-directories according to their top-hierarchy. Not all hierarchies you will see there are really existing hierarchies, some are only typos and got ignored, only hierarchies on this list are official ones. The lists are very big, downloading it can take a while, especially when entering a sub-directory.