This month's Spotlighted newsgroup goes to Hoofarted Cooking Club!
When I first choose this group to be Spotlighted I had No Idea we Had One of the Webtv Pioneers among us, She was here before any of the newsgroups was!! Below she tells us about herself and how The club got the name hoofarted:-)

Thanks To Harriet(July-Ann) For Inviting me Months ago to this great Group, I have only posted A few times, But I do Lurk alot , I am hoping to learn to cook one day..lol Also Thanks to Rosemary a/k/a Hoof for all the help she gave in the molding of our newsgroups! Now lets hear a bit from her:-)


I came on line with WebTV in October 1996,there were not many of us on line at that time. I got involved with the creation of newsgroups after WebTv pulled the plug on the one and only newsgroup we had, called WebTV Talk or W Talk as we called it back then, because of porno pictures being posted.

An employee of WebTV took pity on the newsgroup users who were in no way involved with the few who posted the offensive posts..He went to WebTv to argue our case..He volunteered to make a list of newsgroups for us, without WebTV in the title (so it would not come up in a search engines)His name was/is David Mack.

He (David) asked a few of us to recommend some topics for newsgroups. I was called (by my friends) the grandmother of the newsgroups. I had 10 put on the board.

These newsgroups were called the "w" newsgroups..after about 6 months the "w" groups were changed to the alt.discuss hierarchy that everyone knows today.

When the Club concept came to be, volunteers were asked to test the concept. I said yes,I had to choose a topic so I thought a Cooking Club (to go along with our KitchenTable newsgroup would work)..I tested the group for about 6 weeks and it became a hit. After the testing period was over, I had to make a decision to keep it or delete it with thhe over whelming response to keep it, made up my mine.

The ONLY regret I have is the user name:-) to start a club you must use an active email address.Your email address is part of the Clubs url.
I was just testing the Club, so, I signed on with my hoof email address:-) To keep the Club, I had to keep the email address..so as it turns out the clubs url is news:alt.discuss.clubs.public.home.cooking.hoofarted
some people get a big charge out of it, but new user who do not know me, must be scratching their heads when they see The Cooking Club listed

As of today, The Kitchen Table has been turned into a Club. We now have our Cooking/Recipe Club (The Cooking Club) to post our recipes cooking tips etc and our Kitchen Table Club where we can hang out, and let it all hang out:-) The url for this new club (it was just put on the board this morning) is:
news:alt.discuss.clubs.public.talk.friends.hoofsplace
Rosemary aka Hoof

list of newsgroups started by hoof:-)

alt.discuss.mygrandchild
alt.discuss.humor
alt.discuss.politics
alt.discuss.womens,issues
alt.discuss.womens-forum
alt.discuss. baseball
alt.discuss.talk.radio (now gone) :(
alt.discuss.webtvplus.audio.video
alt.discuss.The Cooking Club
alt.discuss.The Kitchen Table Club (formally) hoofs.KitchenTable


Written By Angel