CONTROL MESSAGE ARCHIVE POLICIES
                        Last modified: 2008-09-14

  This document describes the policies by which the archive of control
  messages in this directory <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/> are
  maintained.

  This is an archive of all newgroup, rmgroup, and checkgroups control
  messages seen on Usenet received since early 1991.  newgroups and
  rmgroups, used to create and remove groups respectively, are arranged by
  subdirectories by top-level hierarchy.  The archive was originally at
  rpi.edu until Fall 1992 when it was moved to uu.net.  It was later moved
  to isc.org.  A month or so of messages (around August 1992) are missing.

  The archives are maintained in gzip (.gz) format.  You will need gzip to
  decompress these archive files.  (Many web browsers will decompress gzip
  automatically for you.)

  The archives update every three hours, so please allow up to six hours
  for a given control message to show up in the archives.

WHAT IS ARCHIVED

  All received newgroup, rmgroup, and checkgroups control messages are
  archived.  newgroup and rmgroup control messages are archived by the
  name of the group that would be affected, arranged in subdirectories by
  top-level hierarchy (the portion of the newsgroup name up to the first
  period).  checkgroups control messages are archived in the other.ctl
  directory by year.

  Other types of control messages used to be archived but are no longer.
  The old archives are still available in the other.ctl directory.

  Only valid control messages are archived.  This means that the article
  must fulfill the following requirements:

  - The message is a validly formatted Usenet article
  - No larger than 256KB (64KB for newgroup and rmgroup messages)
  - Contains an Approved header (even for checkgroups)
  - None of the Approved, Sender, or X-PGP-Sig headers are duplicated
  - If a newgroup mode is specified, it starts with "y" or "m"

  In addition, the newsgroup affected by a newgroup or rmgroup message
  must fulfill the following requirements (where a component is a portion
  of a newsgroup name separated by periods):

  - A component must not contain characters other than [a-z0-9+_.-]
  - A component must contain at least one non-digit
  - A component must not contain uppercase letters
  - A component must begin with a letter or digit
  - Sequences 'all' and 'ctl' must not be used as components
  - The name must have at least two components
  - The first component must begin with a letter
  - The first component must not be "control", "to", or "example".
  - The complete name must not be longer than 80 octets

  To find out what happened to a given control message, look for its
  message ID in the logs at:

    <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/LOGS/>

  If the message was received but not archived for some reason, the reason
  will be logged there.

  Rejected control messages were previously also archived, and those old
  archives can be found in the other.ctl directory.  Messages not
  fulfilling the above requirements are no longer archived at all.

HOW THE ARCHIVES ARE MAINTAINED

  These archives are maintained as automatically as possible.  Subject to
  the above restrictions, all control messages are archived as received,
  but with a "From " line with the arrival date added to the beginning of
  the message and a blank line added to the end of the message so that the
  archives are valid Unix mbox files (unless they contain a "From " line
  in the body; such lines are not escaped).

  We will not make any manual changes to the archives except under
  exceptional circumstances, and a strong justification will be required
  to make manual changes.  However, we may remove messages that pose a
  legal risk for the archive maintainers, cause technical difficulties for
  the archives, were archived in violation of the archive policies due to
  software bugs, or were rendered invalid by a change of the archive
  policies.  Please also be aware that Usenet propagation, while normally
  fairly good, is not perfect, nor is the archiving software, so there is
  always a possibility that some control messages may be missed, filtered
  out by an intervening spam filter, or accidentally dropped.

  Therefore, no guarantee is made that this is a full and complete
  archive.  It is provided as-is, maintained to the best of our ability,
  in the hope that it will be useful.

  If you have any questions or comments about the archive, please send
  them to usenet-config@isc.org.

OTHER RESOURCES

  For one set of currently active newsgroups in various hierarchies and
  information about control message issuers for different hierarchies,
  see:

    <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/>

  For a friendlier unified view of information about known hierarchies,
  including links to specific archive files, see:

    <http://usenet.trigofacile.com/hierarchies/>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

  Copyright 2003, 2008 Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are
  permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice
  and this notice are preserved.  This file is offered as-is, without any
  warranty.

  SPDX-License-Identifier: FSFAP