I've been seriously into tropical fish for a very long time and not in a "Oh that's a pretty tank here in the living room." way but more in a "Why do you have all these tanks?" sort of way.

When I first found usenet I looked for stuff about fish but there were not really any newsgroups where that kind of thing could be found. Keep in mind as of this writing the half dozen or so aquaria newsgroups can have several hundred messages a day. But back then, once a month somebody might post "oscar for free" or something. But that was it.

So I postulated that rec.aquaria would be a good idea. You build it, I'll post my brains out, people will swarm, it'll be great, lets do lunch.

No. Although hundreds of people voted there were enough pinheads that thought this was a waste of precious network resources (which were in use for such vital things as creationism and atheism) that the proposed group came 3 votes away from passing. Eh. I was ahead of my time.

Bob Webber, a professor for computer engineering in New Jersey had his sysadmin, Mel Pleasant create the group alt.aquaria and for years we used the "alt distribution" for news. It worked and there were about 30 messages a day right off the bat and the newsgroup was known as "the shining gem in that sewer otherwise known as alt". It was the 7th most popular alt group in terms of traffic. Or something like that.

But alt didn't get to Europe. We were an island of America and parts of Canada when it wasn't snowing or raining. And we wanted to talk to people around the world.

Back then there were as there are now only "news, comp, sci, rec, misc, talk" news hierachies, in descending order of importance. You had to get news to be on usenet, the computer stuff was considered vital, sci was mostly serious, but things began getting right recreational at rec, misc moreso and talk was for bullshit like creationsm. And junk serious people though was a waste of time. Queue me and my friends who hung out in an odd bastion of the remnants of Paris in the 1920's, except more delusional: talk.bizarre.

So when people started clammoring about moving the aquaria stuff out of alt the obvious answer to me was sci.aquaria, forget about that rec.aquaria crap. It went through the usual rules and procedure and the group was created. Although there was quite a bit of discussion and contention about it and they changed the rules about newsgroup creation because of this as there had been more votes for this than in the last 10 votes put together. The original "100 more yes than no votes" rule was pretty meaningless when you're looking at a total of 1700 votes, especially at a time when 2 or 300 was considered "a lot".

Rec.aquaria was voted on and created anyway and sci.aquaria suffered distribution problems mostly because of this genius.