Creating an alt. news group If a new group is to be justified, its topic must already be under discussion somewhere in existing Usenet groups. The question is: under what circumstances is a new group warranted?

1. If the topic is consistently dominating discussion in a more general group (e.g. 80% of discussion in alt.books.horror is about one author). Forming a new group because of this reason is called "splitting". If you want to form a newsgroup by splitting from an existing group, you should discuss the idea of a new group in the existing group before coming to alt.config with a proposal. People have to agree that there is a logical way to split the discussion. The old and new group would both be need to be viable after the split.