Eternal September

Eternal September ( German Eternal September also: English September that never ended / September that never ended or English endless September / endless September). 's Usenet jargon for the period from September 1993 behind the use of these terms is of the opinion that the have been greatly reduced level of the discussions and the general behavior in Usenet groups, since September 1993 because of the steady stream of new Usenet users. The term is often used in the original English, but also occasionally in the German translation.

History

Usenet was created as a discussion medium between universities. Every year in September were new students who initially did not know about common behavior and netiquette, access to the Usenet. September thus represented the period of the year brought the largest number of beginners in the medium Usenet. After some time, usually the end of each September, the newcomers learned in general to adapt.

In September 1993, the large commercial network provider AOL introduced for the first time its customers access to the Usenet available. From the perspective of many long-established Usenet users in these new entries were much less able to acquire the practices than the freshman. This was due to the fact that AOL customers did not inform about the customs. In addition, newsgroups looked like another AOL service for AOL customers. Last but not least, it was the sheer number of new participants. The long-established users were therefore simply overworked to lead the usual discussions with all newcomers, whom they lack Netiquette and knowledge in the proper use of the media accused. But not acted AOL's complaint management sufficiently against their own users according to many Usenet users, AOL was once in 1999 shortly before a " Usenet Death Penalty" (UDP), the " Usenet Death Penalty", in which the majority of the other Usenet servers AOL -based postings no longer passed and AOL will have isolated from the rest Usenet.

Since then, the dramatic increase in the popularity of the Internet has led to a constant stream of new users. Therefore, - from the perspective of the pre- 1993 users - the normal September influx of newcomers never ended and it was soon that would never end of September, the speech.

On January 25, 2005 AOL announced, mainly due to lack of interest for the average consumer to stop offering their own news server. On 9 February 2005 AOL officially ended this offer. Other services, such as Google Groups keep the influx of new users, however, remains open ( see also the AOL explanation: "Google does a very good job of hosting newsgroups " - something like: " Google does a good job in offering newsgroups ").

Dissemination

In homage to this concept are some computer programs like Mutt able to display the date as a function of 1 September 1993, when they fall back on modified date programs such sdate. So then about May 10, 2007 the 5000th September 1993.