Usenet II

~ the obit ~

Usenet II was a governance argument conducted in English, in news.groups, among people who ran news servers for a living or for love. I was 14 in 1998 and ran nothing. Where I was, Usenet was whatever your ISP's news server happened to carry, and the question of who was allowed to create a newsgroup was settled somewhere far upstream of the dial-up account.

The proposal started in 1998 and it was not a new network. It was the old one with a door policy. Servers peered only with other servers designated "sound", meaning compliant with the written rules, and every newsgroup lived under a name beginning with net. The prefix was deliberate archaeology, the naming scheme Usenet had used before the Great Renaming of 1987 reorganized everything into what became the Big 8. Using it again was a statement about which Usenet this was supposed to be the sequel to.

Authority sat with a Steering Committee, which appointed what the project called hierarchy czars, each responsible for the content of a slice of the namespace. Newsgroup creation was enforced with a checkgroup system built on the same mechanism David C. Lawrence used to run the Big 8, which meant an unauthorized group inside net.* simply would not propagate. Wired covered the launch on 26 February 1998 under the headline "Usenet II: Freedom or Tyranny?", which tells you how the pitch landed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the compliance list ~

The rules were specific enough to read as either admirable or unhinged, depending on how much spam you were eating in 1998. A post had to satisfy RFC 1036 plus a set of extra formatting requirements specific to Usenet II, starting with a From field carrying a real email address. An NNTP-Posting-Host header was mandatory and had to name a sound site. A Subject beginning "Re:" required a valid References field pointing at a real Message-ID, and crossposts to anything outside net.* were canceled automatically.

The Distribution field had to be set to 4gh, which is a reference to John Brunner's novel The Shockwave Rider. One message could not open a discussion in more than three newsgroups, counting both the Newsgroups and Followup-To fields. You were allowed to post the same message three times. You were not allowed to post it every day, or every week.

~ who signed up ~

Russ Allbery, one of the more respected names in Usenet administration, was on the published committee list, and the project never lacked for credibility among people who actually ran servers. What it lacked was readers. It had a rulebook and an appointed czar for every part of its namespace, and an audience that mostly stayed where it already was. A second Usenet is only worth joining once the first one is unusable, and the first one was merely unpleasant.

~ why it stopped mattering ~

Two things happened that nobody designing an anti-spam network in 1998 could have planned around. Spam filtering on the ordinary Usenet got good, through cancel bots and server-side scoring. And the spammers themselves walked away from Usenet to email, where the addressable audience was several orders of magnitude larger.

That left Usenet II with a problem that was solving itself. The effort to extend it was abandoned, without an announcement anyone preserved. The namespace stayed nominally alive for years afterward, in the sense that the group list was still there and almost nothing was posted into it.

~ the name went to a squatter ~

usenet2.org served the same unchanged committee page from October 2008 straight through a capture on 24 February 2010, and by 14 May 2011 it was redirecting somewhere else. The domain resolves today and the site behind it is unrelated, a thing called UseNet 2, A Technology Forum, publishing search-optimized filler about appliance repair in North Carolina, dated 2026.

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