alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan

Long-form reference · 5,048 words · about a 22-minute read

The group's own paperwork

Most of the groups in this directory arrived without documentation, and this one comes close to that condition without quite reaching it. The Internet Systems Consortium's mirror of Usenet control traffic still holds the messages that brought alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan into existence, and the consortium's current newsgroups file still carries the single line of description that travelled with them. Those two files, plus one line in the companion active file, are the entire surviving administrative record of the group so far as this article has been able to establish. Everything documented below is documented from them.

The first message is a newgroup control posted on Sunday 12 April 1998, timestamped 12:35:39 in a zone five hours behind Greenwich, from a sender whose display name in the From line is given as lyza jane and about whom nothing further is recorded. It was addressed to alt.config, the group in which alt.* proposals were conventionally aired and whose own entry in the newsgroups file reads, in its entirety, config. The message carried an Approved header, without which no control message is acted on or archived at all. Its Path header ends at the news server of a commercial internet provider rather than at a university machine; nothing more than that can be read out of it.

The body of the message is short enough to reproduce entire, and reproducing it is the only honest way to describe this group's charter, because the body is the charter. It opens with the formula that a newgroup message must contain if any automated system is to act on it — the words For your newsgroups file: on a line of their own, with no leading whitespace — followed by the line each news administrator was invited to paste into the list of groups on their own machine:

alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan A place to freely complain about anything that you want

Below that, the message added its own account of where the group had come from and what it was for:

This group alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan has been discussed in alt.config. A review of the discussion follows: you can complain and bitch about anything, anytime

Will be for people to tell their problems, their gripes, their complaints about anything without being told to stick to the subject at hand.

That is the whole of it: fifty-five characters of description and two sentences of rationale, the second of which is a fragment. There is no section headed Charter and none headed Justification, though other alt.* newgroup messages of the period did carry both. The assertion that the group “has been discussed in alt.config” is the message's statement about itself; the control archive holds control messages and not ordinary articles, so whatever discussion took place is not in the record consulted for this page.

The description line has never changed. It appears in the consortium's newsgroups file today word for word as it was written, and in the active file the group is listed with the flag y: unmoderated, open to anyone with a news server that carries it, no submission address, no gatekeeper, no approval. Measured against the formatting guidance the consortium publishes for that file, the line is half obedient. It starts with a capital, as the guidance asks, and it forgoes the closing full stop that descriptions traditionally carried — the guidance explicitly releases writers from that habit on the ground that the character is better spent on the description. But the fifty-five-character limit it appears to meet is the allowance for a short group name. The guidance asks that the whole line fit the seventy-nine columns of a traditional terminal, and that descriptions attached to names of twenty-four characters or more be shortened to suit. This name is twenty-eight characters long, which leaves room for forty-seven; the line as written runs to column eighty-seven. It is over the limit rather than exactly on it, and the software does not care, which is the point.

No vote, no result, nothing to look for

A negative needs stating plainly at the outset, because readers who know how Usenet groups were made will otherwise go looking for paperwork that does not exist. In the Big Eight hierarchies a group of this kind would have left a long trail. The moderation team of news.announce.newgroups published its procedure monthly, and the edition of 7 March 2003 is representative: a proposal begins with a Request for Discussion posted in news.announce.newgroups and crossposted to news.groups, containing a rationale and a charter for every group to be created; the discussion period runs a minimum of twenty-one days; success or failure is then settled by a poll conducted not by the proposer but by a member of the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers; the voting period lasts twenty-one days; the published result carries the name, a form of the e-mail address and the vote of everyone who voted; the proposal passes only if it collects at least a hundred more yes votes than no votes and at least twice as many yes as no; and five further days are allowed for objections before anything is created. The guidelines warn proponents that the whole business typically takes three months. The machinery is described at length on the soc.* hub and is not repeated here.

None of it happened for alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan, and no amount of searching will produce it. In the alt.* hierarchy there was no vote to hold and no result to publish, because the control message is not the outcome of a decision procedure — it is the procedure, with the judgement moved from a single electorate to several thousand news administrators deciding privately whether to honour it. The mechanics of that arrangement belong to the alt.* hierarchy page. What matters here is the evidentiary consequence: the missing vote record is not a hole in the archive but an accurate description of what took place.

How completely the two worlds were separated can be read off a document from the same week. Through the 1990s the moderator of news.announce.newgroups circulated a periodic posting headed Bogus Usenet Groups, listing names that were circulating on news servers without standing: misspellings that had propagated, hierarchies mistaken for groups, groups superseded or long defunct, and names created with no proposal behind them. The edition posted on 13 April 1998 — the day after this group's newgroup message went out — lists 631 names, and every one of them is in comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.* or talk.*. That is not an accident of sampling. The posting states its own scope in a note at the foot: it covers the eight Usenet hierarchies and the INET groups, and nothing else. The commonest single reason given, against 374 of the 631 entries, is the bare phrase no proposal. In the Big Eight a name without a proposal behind it was a defect worth publishing monthly. In alt.* it was the normal condition of every name in the hierarchy, and no list was kept.

A hierarchy that could name a mood

The observation this page exists to make is a structural one, and the easiest way to see it is to read the rules that a name in alt.* actually had to satisfy. They are entirely typographic, and the consortium notes that they follow the syntax rules of the relevant Usenet standard rather than any editorial policy. A component — the portion of a name between two dots — may contain only lower-case letters, digits and a few punctuation marks; it must contain at least one non-digit; it must not contain capitals; it must begin with a letter or a digit; the sequences all and ctl are forbidden; a name must have at least two components; the first must begin with a letter and must not be control, to or example; and the whole thing must be no longer than eighty characters. To that the consortium adds requirements on the message rather than on the name: an Approved header, a syntactically valid Control header, a size limit, and a description line in the prescribed form.

Nothing in that list says anything about meaning. There is no requirement that a name denote a subject, no requirement that a subject exist, and nobody empowered to ask. In the Big Eight the opposite was true by construction. A proposed name had to lie inside one of the eight hierarchies, each component was capped at twenty characters rather than the whole name at eighty, and the name had to survive at least three weeks of public argument about whether it described its subject accurately and sat in the right branch of the tree. A Big Eight name is a claim about a subject, tested in public. An alt.* name is a string of legal characters.

What the hierarchy did with that latitude is the interesting part, and it is not only the well-known crop of joke names whose entire content was the name. Alongside the tens of thousands of ordinary topical groups, alt.* accumulated a small class of groups whose name denotes not a thing to be discussed but a way of speaking: alt.flame, alt.peeves, alt.spleen, alt.life.sucks, alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan. None of these tells a reader what will be discussed; each tells them precisely how. The subject line of the group is left blank and the register is filled in instead — an inversion of the way every other namespace on Usenet was designed to work, and one that only a hierarchy with no semantic gatekeeping could produce.

The scale of that latitude is measurable, and the numbers are worth setting down because they are checkable. The consortium's control archive keeps one file for every alt.* name that has been the subject of a valid newgroup or rmgroup message since early 1991; at the time of writing it holds 36,208 of them. The current newsgroups file lists 20,466 alt.* groups, against 45,003 groups in all hierarchies of every kind combined. Nearly half of everything on that list is alt.*, and considerably more alt.* names have been shouted at the network than appear on it — the archive files any valid control message, while the newsgroups file admits only groups whose message also carried a usable description in the prescribed form. A name could be created and still never be written down.

This particular name is a three-component construction, twenty-eight characters long, and its middle component is an orphan. There is no group called alt.complainers in the newsgroups file, and the control archive has no file for that name at all, which means no valid newgroup or rmgroup message for it has been seen since the archive began in 1991. The hierarchy that the name implies was never built. Only the leaf exists, hanging from a branch that was never grown — which is itself a small illustration of how little a name in alt.* was required to answer for.

The venting group as a documented form

alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan invented nothing. By April 1998 the venting group was an established shape on Usenet with examples six years older, and the evidence for that sits in the same two files. Each of the following is listed in the consortium's current newsgroups file with the description quoted, and each has newgroup messages in the control archive on the dates given.

• alt.flame — “Alternative, literate, pithy, succinct screaming.” The earliest newgroup message the archive holds for it is dated 25 April 1992.
• alt.peeves — “Discussion of peeves & related.” Its earliest archived newgroup message is dated 25 April 1992 as well, under five minutes after the one for alt.flame and from the same sender, which reads as a batch reissue rather than as two coincidental creations.
• alt.spleen — “Venting as a biological function.” Newgroup message dated 17 July 1992.
• alt.life.sucks — “Another whingy alt group.” Newgroup message dated 16 March 1993, reissued in January 1995, and in November 1998 the target of a burst of rmgroup messages from a single sender that had no effect on the listing.
• alt.video.dvd.complain — “A place to complain about DVD:” Newgroup message dated 2 June 1998, seven weeks after this group's.

One entry in that family is worth its own paragraph because it compresses the whole argument into a day. A newgroup message for alt.communicomm-cable.whine-and-complain went out on the evening of 16 September 2002, complete with a charter, a declaration that the group was unmoderated, and a justification reading in full: “Cause it can be, and I just did”. The following morning a second sender issued a PGP-signed rmgroup asking servers to delete it again, quoting the original message back in the body and listing the objections — an unnecessary second-level hierarchy, no charter, no justification, and no discussion in alt.config. Nobody adjudicated between them, because in alt.* there is nobody to adjudicate. The group is on the consortium's list today, described as “Users of Communicomm Cable”, because rmgroup messages in alt.* are ignored by the list's maintainers as a matter of published policy. The objection was not overruled; it was simply not the kind of thing the machinery reads.

The form was not confined to alt.*, and it did not begin there. Local and institutional hierarchies had run gripe groups for years, listed in the same file with the same deadpan brevity. The University of Waterloo's computing facility maintained an entire small taxonomy of them: uw.mfcf.gripe, described as software problem reporting; uw.mfcf.bugs, for demonstrated problematic behaviour in software; uw.mfcf.people, for comments directed to and from the facility's staff; uw.mfcf.suggestions, described as “what would you like”; and a moderated uw.mfcf.system for system problems. The University of Minnesota's computer science department had umn.cs.gripes, “Gripes from/about/for U of Minnesota CSci Dept.”, alongside umn.cs.bldg for reports of needed building maintenance. These are complaint groups with an addressee. The complaint is expected to be about something specific and to reach someone in a position to act on it, and the finer distinctions between the Waterloo groups are distinctions between kinds of remedy. The alt.* venting group removes the addressee entirely. That is the whole of the difference between the two forms, and it is not a small one.

Between the two sits the largest family of the three: the company complaint group, whose name is a verdict and whose addressee is a corporation that never asked to be there. Eighty-one names in the current newsgroups file end in the string sucks. Two of them are preserved in this directory — alt.verizon-sucks, whose description line is the lower-case fragment “discuss how much verizon sucks”, and alt.netscape.sucks, which carries no description at all — and the naming convention itself, along with the trademark and gripe-site law that grew up around its web equivalent, is treated on those pages rather than on this one.

Set against all of them, alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan is the general case. No company, no department, no product, no person, no fault to be fixed. It is the only member of the set from which nothing whatever can be inferred about what will be complained about, which is precisely what its description line says: anything that you want.

The flame, and the vocabulary Usenet built for it

The network had a technical vocabulary for angry speech long before it had a hierarchy loose enough to give that speech an address. The Hacker's Dictionary, the 1983 printing of the collaborative glossary later known as the Jargon File, defined flame as “to speak rabidly or incessantly on an uninteresting topic or with a patently ridiculous attitude”. The definition is worth reading twice. It classifies a manner of speaking, not a subject; the offence is in the delivery. That is the same move the venting group makes with a newsgroup name, fifteen years earlier and in a dictionary.

The later Jargon File split the word into a small apparatus of distinctions, all of them concerned with degree and form rather than with what was being said. Flaming is the act; flamage is the content, glossed as flaming verbiage and especially high-noise, low-signal postings to Usenet; a flame is a single such message; a flamer is one who does it habitually, said especially of obnoxious Usenet personalities; a flame war is an acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as Usenet; and flame bait is a posting intended to trigger one, or one that invites flames in reply. Six entries for gradations of the same behaviour is a good measure of how much attention the culture paid to it.

One entry in the same glossary describes the venting group so exactly that it could serve as its charter. Under rave, the third listed sense is “to complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty”. The word carried a softer charge than flame — the file notes that rave implies it is the persistence or obliviousness of the speaker that grates, where flame implies somewhat more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well — but the definition names the essential feature of the form. A venting group is an arrangement for complaining where nobody present can fix anything, entered into knowingly by all parties.

There was a typographic convention to go with the vocabulary. A poster who intended to lose their temper on purpose marked the passage FLAME ON and closed it FLAME OFF. The Jargon File records the origin as a pun on the catchphrase of Marvel Comics's Human Torch, a founding member of the Fantastic Four, and adds that the reference is no longer widely recognised. The convention is documented in the etiquette literature as well as the folklore, and its logic is the same as the venting group's: fence off the outburst so that the reader knows which register they are in.

What the etiquette documents said about complaining

Usenet's manners were written down, repeatedly, by people who had no authority to enforce them. The best-known formal statement is RFC 1855, Netiquette Guidelines, published in October 1995, written by S. Hambridge of Intel Corporation and issued as FYI 28 by the Responsible Use of the Network working group of the IETF. It is explicitly informational and specifies no Internet standard of any kind; it is a set of bulleted suggestions that organisations were invited to adapt for their own use. On the subject of anger it is consistent and slightly weary.

Its general advice on messages is to be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive: you should not send heated messages — “we call these ‘flames’”, the document explains to a 1995 reader who might not know — even if you are provoked, and if you are flamed, it is prudent not to respond. It suggests waiting overnight before sending an emotional reply. Where strong feeling is unavoidable, it recommends indicating it by means of a FLAME ON and FLAME OFF enclosure, and prints a worked example whose contents are a complaint about the bandwidth wasted by the argument it is answering. And it carries a flat instruction twice over, once in the general guidance for mailing lists and news and again in the guidance specific to Usenet, in the same words each time: do not get involved in flame wars, and neither post nor respond to incendiary material. Repeating a rule word for word in a document that short is a fair indication of how often it was broken.

The satirical literature is at least as informative, and on Usenet it was distributed the same way. Brad Templeton's Dear Emily Postnews — the name is a pun on Emily Post, the etiquette authority, and on postnews, the program used to send an article in the early Usenet software — gave the same advice inverted, in the voice of an agony aunt whose every recommendation was a mistake. On being insulted, Emily counsels getting right down to the insulter's level and firing a return salvo, on the grounds that a net flame battle takes at least two participants, so you should do your best to make sure you are one of them. On making a new group she summarises the mainstream procedure as a call for discussion, followed by a call for flames, followed by a call for arguments about the name and a call for run-on puns, before anyone gets round to votes. Both jokes land because both were recognisable, and the second of them is a fair description of why some proposers preferred a hierarchy where none of that was required.

Read together, the serious document and the satirical one describe a network that regarded complaint as inevitable, expression of it as a hazard to be bracketed and delayed, and the wrong venue as the aggravating factor. No document consulted for this page draws the connection, so it is offered here as an observation rather than a finding: a group whose name is the bracket, and whose stated purpose is to hold the material that would otherwise be posted somewhere it did not belong, is a structural version of the same advice. Where the etiquette documents ask the individual to hold their temper, the venting group asks the namespace to hold it instead.

On topic, and the one rule this group suspended

Of all the conventions the period's guides repeat, the most insistent is the simplest: post to the group the article is about, and do not carry a subject into a room that is not for it. Off-topic posting, thread hijacking and indiscriminate cross-posting head every list of Usenet sins, and the reason was economic before it was social. An article was copied from server to server until every site carrying the group held a copy, and the cost of that copying fell on the sites and on the readers who paid for their connections, whether or not anyone wanted the article.

The 1998 control message answers that rule directly, and it is the one sentence in the group's paperwork that does any work beyond naming it. The group is to be for people to tell their problems, their gripes and their complaints about anything without being told to stick to the subject at hand. The phrasing takes the standing rule of every other group on the network and suspends it, not by argument but by declaring a room where the rule does not apply. Whether anyone ever used the room is a separate question, and one this page cannot answer.

The suspension was affordable because Usenet placed the cost of a bad group almost entirely on the people who chose to read it. A group imposes nothing on a reader who does not subscribe, and readers had tools for the ones they did: the kill file, a store of text patterns matched against article headers so that anything from a given author or bearing a given subject was silently skipped. The feature was first implemented in rn, Larry Wall's newsreader, originally released in 1984, and serious newsreaders afterwards had one; later programs generalised it into scoring, where rules add and subtract points and an article disappears below a threshold. A hierarchy in which the reader does the filtering can afford tens of thousands of groups nobody reads, and it acquired them.

Boosters, and how an alt.* group stays alive

The second and last message in the group's file is dated 21 February 2003, four years and ten months after the first. It is another newgroup control for the same name, carrying an identical description line, and it says what it is: a header in the message reads simply Comment: Booster message, and the body repeats the word in English and in German beneath the description. It was produced by an automated tool whose user-agent string names a script called newgroup.pl at version 1.3, it is marked with X-No-Archive: yes, and it was posted to four newsgroups — comp.lang.fortran, alt.music.sandra, alt.test and alt.flame.cats — that have nothing to do with the group or with one another. That last detail is not a mistake. The Newsgroups header of a control message has no bearing on which group the message affects; the Control header does that, and the Newsgroups header only determines which readers happen to see the article go past.

Neither the message nor the archive explains why it was sent, so the reason has to be inferred from the mechanics, and the mechanics are not obscure. A newgroup message is a request rather than an instruction, and requests go astray. A server that was not running when the original passed, or was rebuilt afterwards, or dropped the group for lack of traffic, will not have it; reissuing the message gives the group another chance at each of them. Whatever the motive in this instance, the effect of a booster is to put the group's name back in front of every server on the network.

It also determines what the group's description says today. The consortium's published policy for alt.* is that all properly formatted newgroup messages are executed automatically, all rmgroups are ignored, and the moderation status and description of a group are set to whatever appeared in the last control message for it. The line in the file is therefore not the 1998 original but the 2003 booster's copy of it — character for character the same text, differing only in the whitespace between the group name and the description, where the original used two spaces and the booster a tab. The effect of the policy is that this group cannot be removed from the list by any ordinary means. Its paperwork is now considerably more durable than its traffic can ever have been.

What the record does not show

An honest inventory of ignorance is the most useful thing this page can carry, so here it is in full.

There is no charter beyond the description line and the two sentences quoted at the top of this article. No longer statement of purpose was posted with the control message, none is referenced by it, and none has been found anywhere.

There is no creation debate. The message asserts that the group was discussed in alt.config; the control archive holds control messages and not ordinary articles, so that discussion — if it happened, and a claim of prior discussion is common boilerplate in alt.* newgroup messages — is not in the material consulted here. This page has not read it and does not know what was said, by whom, or whether anyone objected.

There is no traffic figure of any kind. No count of articles, no count of posters, no estimate of readership, no month in which the group was busy or quiet. Nothing in the administrative record measures use, because the administrative record was never designed to; the active-file entry carries placeholder article numbers rather than real ones. This page therefore makes no claim whatever about how much was posted to alt.complainers.bitch-n-moan, and any figure a reader encounters elsewhere should be traced to its source before being believed.

There is no archive claim. This article is written from control messages and configuration files; it has not read a single article posted to the group, and it does not assert that any survive. The standard access links for this group appear in the box above these sections; what they return is for the reader to find out.

There is no moderator, no FAQ, no periodic posting, no charter revision and no removal attempt. The control archive holds exactly two messages for this name, both of them newgroups. Nobody ever sent an rmgroup for it, which in a hierarchy where removal attempts were routine is mildly notable and entirely uninterpretable.

There is no community that can be named. One display name appears in the record, on the 1998 message, and it identifies the person who sent a control message rather than anyone who used the group. No other participant is documented.

The archive itself carries caveats that this page adopts. The control collection covers messages received since early 1991; it was kept at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute until the autumn of 1992, then at UUNET, and later at the Internet Systems Consortium; a month or so of messages from around August 1992 is missing; and its maintainers note that only valid control messages are archived and that the collection is maintained as automatically as possible. Every count in this article — two messages, one description, no rmgroup — is therefore a floor rather than a certainty.

What surrounds those absences is context that can be checked independently, and it has been: the naming rules that permitted the name, the older groups that established the form, the institutional gripe groups that show the form was not an alt.* invention, and the etiquette literature that gave complaint its vocabulary and its conventions. That context is real, and it stops where the checking stops. There is no honest way to extend the group's own story further without inventing a thread, a reader, a figure or a quarrel, and a directory that is cited as a reference cannot afford to do that even once.

Where the rest of this is kept

The mechanics of group creation, propagation and removal in alt.* — how a control message travels, who acts on it, and why an rmgroup is a suggestion — are set out at length on the alt.* hierarchy page, and the contrasting Big Eight procedure summarised above is documented on the soc.* hub. The parody group, which overlaps the venting group at the edges and is nonetheless a different thing, is treated at alt.support.jock-strap. For the way Usenet handled the opposite impulse — collecting the network's best writing rather than its worst mood — see alt.humor.best-of-usenet.