blueyonder carries an extensive news feed, but has made a policy decision not to carry all Usenet newsgroups, as it believes it is pointless to have groups on its servers using disk space and bandwidth when they are not being used by any of its users. As with any of blueyonder's services, speed is of primary concern.

Saying that, if you know of a Usenet group that is not on its servers, and that you would like to subscribe to, blueyonder is happy to add it for you as long as it is not a banned group and it falls within the ISC listings of publicly available newsgroups.

A local copy of this file is also available, and updates at around 0200 daily. It is based upon this file that blueyonder adds newsgroups. Because it is only updated once daily, you may need to wait 24 hours from the addition of any group to this "master" list before it can be added locally.

You can search this file on blueyonder's web site at http://tools.blueyonder.co.uk.

ISC (Internet Software Consortium)

The ISC holds what is deemed by the industry (ISPs in general) to be the canonical listing of publicly available newsgroups - and also those that meet the agreed (by the creators of the top level news hierarchies) Usenet naming standards.

The ISC listings are updated daily, and blueyonder updates its local version of their listings on a daily basis. The proposer of any newsgroup that wishes this group to be peered (i.e. seen) by anyone will declare this by having their group listed on the ISC - as long as it meets their naming standards (see ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/README for more information), and if it is not on this list blueyonder will not carry this group.

There are also a number of groups that are deemed to be illegal in the United Kingdom, and blueyonder will not carry any of these groups either.

Adding a Group

When you have checked the presence of your group and found that it is in the ISC listings, if you post to the newsgroup blueyonder.support.usenet and ask for it to be added it will be carried as long as it's not in the banned listing of groups. The group will be added within an hour of blueyonder actioning your request (note: not within an hour of sending your request), and you should be able to access it from then.

Creating a new group

If you wish to create a new group and have it added to Usenet you need to follow the formal Usenet procedures to do this (so it can be listed with the ISC and then added to blueyonder accordingly).

If you wish to create a group in the 'Big 8' hierarchies you should refer to the 'Guidelines for Big Eight Newsgroup Creation' regularly posted to the group alt.config; if you wish to have an 'alt.*' group created there is an FAQ posted frequently, also in alt.config, with all the information you need.

There is also a guide for creation of the alt.* newsgroups hierarchy listed at http://www.visi.com/~barr/alt-creation-guide.html

When your group has been created following the procedure, and when it is on the ISC active file, post a request in blueyonder.support.usenet and the Technical Support team will add the group.

Last Amended : 2004-03-15 by elfin
Original Author : Alex Brown - blueyonder Webmaster