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The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. The primary reason was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups. * An alternative explanation was that European networks refused to pay for some of the discussion-intensive groups regarding religion and racism; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups. *, * The suggested category for the newsgroups less popular among European networks was talk. While reorganization discussions had taken place earlier, software limitations prevented the adoption of a consistent organization scheme. Improvements introduced by Adams in 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. With this added flexibility and transparency, it became practical to undertake the effort. The backbone providers, "the backbone cabal," were instrumental in this reorganization of Usenet since they had a great influence with respect to supporting a new newsgroup. Some suggest that members of the cabal had interests in bundling certain newsgroups into the talk. A more detailed account of reasons behind the Renaming can also be seen in a Usenet article posted by Gene Spafford at net.news and net.news.group. These newsgroups were categorized into a series of hierarchies, to make it easier for newsgroups to be created and distributed. The original hierarchies, were: comp. 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. Several other popular hierarchies remained on Usenet as well, such as the k12. An additional hierarchy, alt.*, was also created shortly after the Renaming. The term alt is short for "alternative" (but has been taken to stand for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"). The alt. In the mid-1990s, when the Usenet traffic grew significantly, one more hierarchy, humanities.
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