META A brief history of ascii-art groups on netnews

In article <wVT...@mindvox.phantom.com> on alt.binaries.pictures.ascii,
Sandro Sherrod <oob...@mindvox.phantom.com> wrote:
>Whats the difference between here and alt.ascii-art? With the exception 
>more posts over therE?
>

A brief history of ascii-art groups on netnews:

Rumor has it that there was an ascii-art group on alt years ago, that
failed for lack of interest.  No evidence has turned up, though.  The
main purveyor of fine ascii-art-archives during the early 90s had
been Steven Sullivan, in his postings to rec.humor.

Alt.config folklore says proposals for a new group had been coming up
every few months, for some time before September 1993, when the
discussion that led to alt.ascii-art began.  Resistance in alt.config
was intense, led by Tim Pierce who argued that ascii-art was binary and
belonged in the alt.binaries.pictures.* hierarchy.  He got a lot
more support on this than seems credible, in retrospect.

After a month of pointless hassling, the gordian knot was cut by Joel
Furr newgrouping alt.ascii-art.  It was generally agreed that
alt.arts.ascii would have been the better choice (to keep the
number of new first-level hierarchies down), but the group took
off pretty quickly, so we decided to go with it.... except after a
month, when it became clear a lot of sites weren't getting a.a-a,
Tim took the opportunity to newgroup a.b.p.ascii, along with a
request to rmgroup alt.ascii-art, already a thriving subculture!

The tide of opinion turned against Tim at this point, and a rmgroup
for abpa went out, resulting in sites that carried both, neither,
*and* just one or the other-- but abpa has pretty well withered,
while a.a-a has grown to where a split has been seriously discussed,
and over-hasty newgroups posted for:

alt.ascii-art.pixellated (by people wishing ascii-gifs would go away)
and
alt.ascii-art.animation (ditto for ansi animations)

a.a-a.p seems to have vanished, but a.a-a.a gets occasional posts and
may well be revived at some point.  I wouldn't mind trying to move
the asciigifs over to alt.binaries.pictures.ascii, since it's a group
that won't go away...

The plan for the future, now, is to create a *moderated*
rec.arts.ascii (Bob Allison has volunteered to moderate).  Anyone with
experience proposing and creating a moderated big-7 group, or other
constructive ideas, should write Bob or me...

jorn