An aside redux: The End of September?

[L. Shelton Bumgarner]

Is it possible that September is over? It used to be that every
September, Usenet was flooded by clueless newbies trying out their new
accounts for Their School Of Choice .edu sites. Later, around 1993{?}
the time of troubles know as The Year September Never Ended began. It
seemed as though newbies were flooding Usenet _constantly_, with
no end of sight.

Yet from what I can tell, September may finally be over. We no longer
have any major online services about to come crashing in. AOL seems to
be behaving itself. And in a weird way Usenet seems to be winning the
PR battle for once. (I actually saw an article in Time that referred
to "Usenet newsgroups." It only took them two years to give us our
proper title. (Now if we could only get it accepted as AP style...)

The whole point of this is, Usenets population is fairly stable now.
Either newbies are not posting as much anymore or they are taking time
to read up on Usenet's culture before they do. Of course, maybe we
oldbies have simply gotten used to newbies. But I don't think that's
the case. I've really not noticed nearly as many stupid, weird posts
in the wrong place as I did just a year ago. (I've seen some but they
may have been X-posted from alt.religion.kibology.)

-l
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// A M I G A |Lee S. Bumgarner
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Warning: my posts are frequently sardonic |Freedom or Death