"Nick Andrew" in message :
>
> That's not the way regional hierarchies work.

Good point, I am accustomed to this arising on the "Big Eight" hierarchies
(which include RFC), and the same flow seemed present here.

I was reading some (offline) archives of newsgroups where related
discussions arose, around genuine perceived needs whose solution might be
two-edged. Example to hand, in 1991 there was a single drinks newsgroup
rec.food.drink, which before the Renaming was a wines group (net.wines).
Some posters demanded in 1991 a separate newsgroup on home beer brewing.
One of them, arguing for such a spinoff, posted:

> I don't really mind the liquor posts but these wines posts get real old.
> It's hard to relax and have a homebrew when you have to sort through
> massive amounts of extra stuff ...

(That, remember, appeared on a newsgroup created for wines.) There had not
been nearly enough homebrew postings earlier to argue for a group on the
subject, so they ended up on RFC or rec.food.drink. (Actually in early days
there were barely enough wine postings even; circa 1983-84 Steve Pope and I
would "seed" the wines group with them, to keep it active.) A new group was
not much of an issue in 1991 though, because the subject matters were
distinct in this case.


Extend the concept of regional spinoffs from rec.food.cooking: Imagine a
dozen major regional food newsgroups. (Not just restaurant fora like
existing localized *.food and *.eats.) This would surely affect RFC. The
effect would defy newsgroup decorum (however formally legal the regional
formations might be by their own rules).