Eternal September - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“In Usenet slang, Eternal September (or the September that never ended)[1] began in September 1993,[2] the month that Internet service provider America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, and later millions, of users. Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to American colleges and universities. Every year in September, a large number of incoming freshmen acquired access to Usenet for the first time, and took some time to become accustomed to Usenet’s standards of conduct and "netiquette”. But, after a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks’ social norms or simply tire of using the service. 

However, for the existing userbase, the influx of new users from September 1993 onwards was a new and endless manifestation of the phenomenon.This was in part because the new internet service providers such as AOL made little effort to educate their users about Usenet customs, but it was also because of the large scale and seemingly endless intake of new users. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would quickly settle down, Usenet’s existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer and endless number of new users and so they overwhelmed the network’s existing social norms.[3]“