Usenet groups

Usenet was the online birth place of the Doom community in 1993, as news about the game's ongoing development created an unprecedented level of hype and enthusiasm in the then-nascent online gaming scene. Several members of id Software, John Romero and Jay Wilbur in particular, often personally posted information and responses to the newsgroups. The Official Doom FAQ started as a collection of such information and related postings on by avid user Hank Leukart. Another significant record of the groups' culture exists in the form of the FAQ's sister document Doom Insanity, a collection of humorous anecdotes which were also collected by Leukart.

List of groups
Doom discussion had by necessity begun in the more generic newsgroup, and after its release in-depth discussion spread to the newly created  group and subsequently into sub-groups. However, even though traffic was high, many Doom players could not access these groups, as propagation of the unofficial hierarchy was much lower than of the then-, and even worse for unofficial groups created without the required discussion in.

To address these problems, in November 1994 the members of this hierarchy, organized by proponent John Van Essen, voted 378-89 (on average) in favor of the creation of the hierarchy. This Big-7 hierarchy aimed to foster Doom-related discussions through a better topical organisation with a bigger audience. New players were welcomed with a series of periodic informational postings (PIPs) in addition to the Doom Help Service, and team of volunteers (initially titled 'coordinators') strived to keep a good signal-to-noise ratio. Three of the groups (, and ) were intended as direct replacements of their  origins.

From the end of 1994 up until the gradual sunset of Usenet in the early 2000s, these groups served as one of the main forums for online discussion of Doom. Their functions were gradually replaced by websites with forums as the growth of the World Wide Web took stride. After their creation, discussion of Doom became off-topic in the hierarchy and could earn a poster scorn. Discussion of Heretic, Hexen and Strife was additionally considered on-topic for the Doom-related groups.

Notable late activities included coordination of the Boom source port's development in 1998, much of which took place via Usenet.

In April 2007, was removed as there had been no activity since 2000.

Controversy
Having two Doom-oriented hierarchies would keep Doom discussions fragmented, and the alphabetical newsgroup listing was making it harder for new users to find the hierarchy. During discussion of their creation, removal of the hierarchy was stipulated if their traffic had slowed down enough.

Therefore the moderator and coordinators, proponent John Van Essen, RGCD FAQ author Frans P. de Vries and others actively attempted to persuade users to migrate to the new groups, even half-jokingly calling themselves the RGCD Steering Committee. That name proved counter-productive in itself and was quickly replaced by RGCD Support Team, while the coordinator titles were dropped as well.

Although a fair number of users indeed migrated, others opposed – sometimes quite vocally – and claimed that coordination equaled censorship, preferring the anarchy of the hierarchy. Months of irregular flame wars and trolling followed, during which the Support Team challenged invitations to migrate back and refuted unfounded claims with facts. The controversy also spawned entirely bogus newsgroups such as and.

During Summer 1995 a final attempt was made to convince users to migrate and address allegations, but traffic never slowed down enough to warrant their removal as originally planned. After 1996 the RGCD Support Team slowly disbanded but kept posting the PIPs until September 2000.