From: joe@sfbooks.com 
  
 In article , 
 Irene Waters  wrote: 
  
 > "Joe Bernstein"  wrote 
  
 > > Yeah.  I got irritated at the guy from misc.invest.* attacking you for 
 > > not using the bogus groups misc.invest and misc.invest.fixed-income, 
 > > but it turns out I was sending you to a bogus group too; the most recent 
 > > list of Big 8 groups shows only soc.senior.health and soc.senior.issues, 
 > > approximately (I'm not looking at the list as I type).  So I retract 
 > > this suggestion, with my apologies. 
  
 > For the record, I am still not sure whether soc.seniors ever passed 
 > through a full RFD and CFV. I see evidence it may have. Technically 
 > speaking, I am doubtful it ever qualified formally as a news.group 
 > "bogus group." Lists of bogus groups do appear from time to time, as 
 > you may be aware, based on my groups.google search. By contrast, 
 > misc.invest.fixed-income *is* formally a "bogus group." misc.invest as 
 > far as I can tell was never a group or bogus group. It's just part of 
 > the hierarchy naming system, I suppose. 
  
 A group is "bogus" if it isn't currently an official Big 8 group but 
 is in the Big 8 namespace (that is, its name begins with comp, 
 humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc or talk).  Things used to be 
 more complicated than that (inet groups) but this is no longer an 
 issue (the inet groups all got made official Big 8 groups a year ago). 
 So the group can be a group that was really created officially, 
 existed for a while, and was then removed (like misc.invest.funds), 
 or it can be a group that never existed officially but was created 
 unofficially, or it can even be a group that never existed at all 
 but is just someone's notion. 
  
 I'm working on a chronology of Usenet newsgroup creation as recorded 
 in the official lists, and the below refers to that. 
  
 Although I've reached the beginnings of the more commercially- 
 oriented groups in misc.*, I don't remember offhand whether 
 misc.invest ever existed; I can look it up if anyone cares.  It 
 isn't in the official list now, so is a bogus group. 
  
 I referred to soc.seniors because I thought I remembered seeing it 
 in the lists I'm using as data sources.  I'm now finding essentially 
 no evidence of its existence in Google, and in any event it isn't 
 in the official list now, so it's a bogus group.  (Again, if anyone 
 cares, I can look for the source of my mistake...) 
  
 From late 1992 until sometime in I think 1997, David Lawrence, then 
 the moderator of news.announce.newgroups, posted lists of "Bogus 
 Groups".  I don't know what his procedure was for deciding whether to 
 add a group to the list, but my *guess* from what I've seen of it is 
 that he did so whenever someone issued a control message to create 
 such a group, whether by mistake or on purpose.  I'm quite sure that 
 it never included all possible bogus groups.  In any event, if you've 
 seen a list later than 1998 or so, that's news to me, and I'd be 
 interested in knowing more about it. 
  
 > Please see my response to Arthur about why I have done this. 
  
 No time til later in the week, I'm afraid.  So I'm snipping much 
 here, that I might, with more time, have come up with replies to. 
 (Or might not have; I hope not, because I don't actually see 
 anything I *needed* to reply to, could offer any special knowledge 
 concerning...) 
  
 So, um, until later... 
  
 Joe Bernstein 
  
 -- 
 Joe Bernstein, writer                                  joe@sfbooks.com 
                   At this address, 
 personal e-mail is welcome, though unsolicited bulk e-mail is unwelcome. 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)