Editing Great Renaming (section)

===Pre-renaming===
Before the Renaming, the newsgroups were categorized into three hierarchies: ''fa.*'' for groups gatewayed from [[ARPANET]], ''mod.*'' for [[moderation system|moderated]] discussions, and ''net.*'' for unmoderated groups. Names of the groups were said to be rather haphazard.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.linux.it/~md/usenet/gr.html |title=The Great Renaming FAQ |publisher=Linux.it |access-date=31 August 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110722041953/http://www.linux.it/~md/usenet/gr.html|archive-date=22 July 2011|url-status=live}}</ref>

While reorganization discussions had occurred earlier, software limitations prevented the adoption of a consistent organizational scheme.  Improvements introduced by Adams during 1986 with [[B News]] version 2.11 removed the requirement for moderated groups to use the "mod." prefix, allowed posting to moderated groups using [[news client|newsreader]]s rather than separate [[e-mail]] programs, and eliminated the flat storage method, which required that the first 14 characters of all newsgroups be unique.  With this added flexibility and transparency, it became practical to perform the effort.