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A frequently asked questions (FAQ) list is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps. The purpose of a FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns; however, the format is a useful means of organizing information, and text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked.
James Parry, commonly known by his nickname and username Kibo, is a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long signature, and a machine-assisted knack for "kibozing": joining any thread in which "kibo" was mentioned. His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion "Kibology", centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.
The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. B News maintainer and UUNET founder Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming.
alt.religion.scientology was a Usenet newsgroup started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology and the activities of the Church of Scientology. The newsgroup became the focal point of an aggressive campaign known as Scientology versus the Internet, which took place online and in the courts.
The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "alt.", organized hierarchically. The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to occur in alt.*. The alt.* hierarchy was created by John Gilmore and Brian Reid.
The Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) is the goddess of a parody religion used to satirize theistic beliefs, taking the form of a unicorn that is paradoxically both invisible and pink. The IPU is a rhetorical illustration used by atheists and other religious skeptics as a contemporary version of Russell's teapot, sometimes mentioned in conjunction with the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.
alt.suicide.holiday is a Usenet newsgroup. Its original purpose was to discuss the relationship between suicide rates and holiday seasons. However, it later evolved into a broad discussion forum where suicidal people can openly share their struggles or research suicide methods. Some participants are not suicidal, but post to provide psychological support or advice on how to kill oneself to suicidal or depressed posters. The newsgroup was unmoderated and was subject to occasional bouts of trolling and a harsh and sometimes hostile atmosphere, in mid-2002 the trolling heightened significantly and ended up driving away many regular users. According to its FAQ, its purpose is neither to encourage nor discourage suicide and strongly maintains a pro-choice view on the matter.
alt.sex is a Usenet newsgroup – a discussion group within the Usenet network – relating to human sexual activity. It was popular in the 1990s. An October 1993 survey by Brian Reid reported an estimated worldwide readership for the alt.sex newsgroup of 3.3 million, that being 8% of the total Usenet readership, with 67% of all Usenet "nodes" carrying the group. At that time, alt.sex had an estimated traffic of 2,300 messages per month.
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talk.origins is a Usenet discussion forum concerning the origins of life, and evolution. Its official purpose is to draw such debates out of the science newsgroups, such as sci.bio.evolution and sci.bio.paleontology. With the general decline of evolution/creationism debate and discontinuation of Google Groups support for Usenet in February 2024, Talk.Origins is now largely defunct.
Jewish atheism is the atheism of people who are ethnically and culturally Jewish.
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Control messages are a special kind of Usenet post that are used to control news servers. They differ from ordinary posts by a header field named Control. The body of the field contains control name and arguments.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
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Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
References
- ↑ Holbrook, N. (October 25, 1998), "Atheism Online", The Lantern , archived from the original on 2007-06-16, retrieved 2009-05-22.
- ↑ Brian R. Holt's alt.pagan post announcing his creation of alt.atheism as sourced from Google Groups on January 15, 2016.
- ↑ Kinney, Jay (1995), "Net worth? : Religion, cyberspace and the future", Futures , 27 (7): 763–776, doi:10.1016/0016-3287(95)80007-V .
- ↑ Nash, David (2002), "Religious sensibilities in the age of the internet: freethought culture and the historical context of communication media", in Hoover, Stewart M.; Clark, Lynn Schofield (eds.), Practicing religion in the age of the media: explorations in media, religion, and culture, Columbia University Press, p. 281, ISBN 978-0-231-12089-0 .
- ↑ alt.atheism FAQ as sourced by the Internet Archive on February 11, 2005.
- ↑ Ricker, George A. (2006), Godless in America: Conversations With an Atheist, iUniverse, p. 131, ISBN 978-0-595-39101-1 .
