Eternal September

Eternal September (also September that never ended) is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993. The expression encapsulates the belief that an endless influx of new users (newbies) since that date has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet and the wider Internet.

The term is so well entrenched that one online project providing access to Usenet feeds calls itself Eternal September, and gives the date as a running tally of days since September of 1993 (e.g., Jan. 12, 2012 was "September, 6709 1993, the september that never ends.").

Background

Usenet originated among Northern hemisphere universities, where every year in September, a large number of new university freshmen acquired access to Usenet for the first time, and took some time to acclimatise to the network's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would theoretically learn to comport themselves according to its conventions, or simply tire of using the service. September thus heralded the peak influx of disruptive newcomers to the network.

In 1993, the online service America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, and later millions, of users. To many "old-timers", these "AOLers" were far less prepared to learn netiquette than university students. This was in part because AOL made little effort to educate its users about Usenet customs, or to explain to them that these new-found forums were not simply another piece of AOL's service, but it was also a result of the much larger scale of growth. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would quickly settle down, the sheer number of new AOL users now threatened to overwhelm the existing Usenet culture's capacity to inculcate its social norms.

Since that time, the dramatic rise in the popularity of the Internet has brought a constant stream of new users. Thus, from the point of view of the pre-1993 Usenet user, the regular "September" influx of new users never ended. The term was used by Dave Fischer in a January 26, 1994, post to alt.folklore.computers, "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended."

Some ISPs have eliminated binary groups (Telus in Canada) and others have dropped Usenet altogether (Comcast, AT&T). On February 9, 2005, AOL discontinued newsgroup access through its service, which it announced on January 25, 2005. On September 16, 2008, Comcast discontinued newsgroup access, previously provided to all its high speed customers. This led some commentators to claim that perhaps September is finally over.

External links

• The September That Never Ended on MeatballWiki
• Sdate, a Unix program that outputs the date of Never Ending September