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Newsgroups Policy

AAPT currently carries approximately 12000 newsgroups, although this increases daily.

We honour newsgroup creation and deletion requests from recognised authorities. The newsgroup hierarchies controlled in this manner include aus, comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, talk, and several regional hierarchies.

If the group is not in one of the controlled hierarchies (alt for example), we do not honour group creation and deletion requests, although we do create the group if it starts to see traffic. This avoids the creation of huge numbers of junk or vanity groups that will never see any messages.

We generally don't carry other national hierarchies, such as US, although we do have patchy coverage of the UK (uk), Japanese (fj), German (de) and Italian (it) hierarchies.

We do not carry groups whose names indicate that they contain illegal content (such as "warez" and pedophilia). Although postings of this sort occasionally appear in other hierarchies it is technically not possible for an ISP to monitor the content of newsgroups and we do not attempt to do so.

It's possible for groups to be created (or come into existence through common usage) without AAPT seeing a creation request. If you are aware of a group of this sort that you wish to receive, then e-mail newsmaster@connect.com.au requesting that the newsgroup be added.

Note that it's not always possible to obtain a feed of a particular group - some are subscription only (the clari hierarchy for example), or are for distribution only within an organisation (many universities, research organisations, corporations and military organisations have their own hierarchies). Occasional postings will leak from these hierarchies, giving the impression they exist, but the bulk of their postings will never be seen.