Culture & History

Usenet predates the web by a decade, and it left behind a vocabulary that shaped how the whole internet argues. This section covers netiquette and its enforcement, the events that defined the network's history, and terms like Eternal September, killfile, and flame war. Most entries here are historical, and the section says so where that is true.

60 terms in this category.

Netiquette: The informal code of conduct governing Usenet posting: trim quoted text, keep signatures short, stay on a group's topic, read the FAQ before asking, and avoid crossposting to unrelated groups. Enforcement was purely social, through public correction or killfiles, since no central authority existed. RFC 1855 collected much of it in 1995. The conventions persist on surviving text groups and shaped later email and forum manners.
Eternal September: Universities gave new students accounts each September, producing an annual wave of arrivals who had not yet learned local conventions; regulars endured it until the newcomers settled. In September 1993 AOL connected its subscribers to Usenet and the influx never stopped. The phrase marks the point where the old socialization process broke down, and veterans still date the decline of text Usenet culture from it.
Flame: A hostile, insulting, or deliberately abusive post, aimed at another participant rather than at the argument. Flaming was common enough that groups distinguished ordinary sharp disagreement from it, and some groups existed purely for the practice. Killfiles and a public plonk were the standard defences, since no moderator could intervene in an unmoderated group. The word spread from Usenet into general internet usage.
Flame War: A thread that collapses into sustained mutual insult, often running for hundreds of articles and crossposted into unrelated groups as participants recruit allies. Flame wars were a recurring drain on high-traffic groups; regulars responded by killfiling the participants or by asking that follow-ups be redirected elsewhere with a Followup-To header. Godwin's Law was coined as an observation about how such threads tended to end.
Troll: A post written to provoke angry replies rather than to state a genuine position, named after the fishing technique of trailing bait. Recognizing one and declining to answer was called not feeding the troll; announcing the recognition afterwards often used YHBT. The term came into wide use on Usenet in the early 1990s and has since spread to every online discussion medium.
Lurker: Someone who reads a newsgroup regularly without posting. Lurking for several weeks before a first article was standard advice, since it revealed the group's charter, recurring arguments, and tone. Because reading leaves no trace in the article stream, lurkers vastly outnumbered posters, a fact regulars invoked when warning that any post reached a far larger audience than the handful of visible participants.
Newbie: A new arrival to a newsgroup, or to Usenet generally, marked by unfamiliarity with local conventions rather than by technical inexperience. Posting a question already answered in a group's FAQ, top-posting, or quoting an entire article to add one line all identified one. Treatment ranged from patient pointers to the FAQ through outright flaming, and hardened sharply after Eternal September.
Killfile: A newsreader-side list of patterns, typically author addresses, subject strings, or message-ID references, whose matching articles are hidden before display. Named for the KILL files used by early readers, it put filtering in the reader's hands rather than the server's, so no administrator had to act. Modern newsreaders keep the feature under names like scoring or ignore lists, with weighted rules instead of a flat drop.
Plonk: Posted as a one-word reply, the onomatopoeia for the sound of a killfiled user landing at the bottom of the bit bucket. Announcing a plonk told the group that further articles from that person would go unread, ending the exchange publicly. The convention dates from the late 1980s and survives as internet slang well beyond Usenet, still meaning to filter someone out.
Top-Posting: Writing a reply above the quoted text of the article being answered, leaving the full quote below untouched. Mail clients defaulting to this behavior spread the habit onto Usenet, where technical groups treated it as a breach of netiquette because it inverts reading order and preserves quoted material nobody needs. The resulting argument, framed as top versus bottom posting, recurred for decades.
Bottom-Posting: Placing a reply beneath the quoted material it responds to, so the exchange reads in chronological order. The convention assumed the quote had first been trimmed to the relevant lines; quoting an entire article and adding one sentence at the end drew as much criticism as top-posting did. Most technical newsgroups and many mailing lists treated it as the only correct form.
Inline Posting: Interleaving replies point by point beneath the specific quoted lines they address, trimming everything else away. The style handled long articles containing several separate claims, since each response sat next to its subject. Attribution lines matter here, because several levels of quoting can otherwise obscure who wrote which paragraph. Interleaved replies remain standard on technical mailing lists and in code review.
Snipping: Cutting the quoted portion of an article down to the lines actually being answered, usually marking the cut with a bracketed note reading snip. It kept article sizes down when Usenet moved over slow dial-up links and made threads readable. Failure to snip, especially combined with top-posting and a long signature, was one of the most reliably criticised habits on text groups.
Sig Separator: The three characters dash dash space, alone on a line, marking the start of a signature block. Newsreaders use it to strip signatures automatically when quoting an article and often to display them in a different colour. Established by convention long before it was written into the article format standards, and still honoured by most mail and news software today.
Sig Virus: A joke signature asking readers to copy it into their own signature, spreading by imitation rather than by any code. Popular in the early 1990s, the texts usually parodied chain letters or the virus warnings then circulating. Nothing executes and nothing is infected; the humour lies in humans acting as the propagation mechanism. Largely extinct along with elaborate signature blocks generally.
ROT13: A letter substitution rotating each alphabetic character thirteen places, so applying it twice restores the original text. Used on Usenet to obscure spoilers, punchlines, and material some readers would rather not see unprepared, never as encryption. Nearly every newsreader has a single key or menu item that decodes a selection. Text groups still use it where reading something should take a deliberate act.
Spoiler Warning: A notice at the top of an article warning that plot details follow, usually followed by blank lines, a form feed character that stops many readers from paging further, or ROT13 text. Groups discussing films, books, and television maintained their own conventions about how long after release the warning stayed mandatory. The practice began on Usenet and carried over into web forums and social media.
FAQ: A maintained document collecting a group's recurring questions and their agreed answers, reposted to the group at intervals and often mirrored in the news.answers hierarchy. Reading the FAQ before posting was the first rule of netiquette, and a bare pointer to it was the usual answer to a repeat question. Many Usenet FAQs became the earliest authoritative reference on their subject.
Periodic Posting: An article reposted to a group on a fixed schedule, monthly or weekly, carrying material every reader is meant to see: the FAQ, the charter, posting guidelines, or a list of related groups. An Expires header was normally set so the article stayed available until the next issue arrived. Automated scripts handled the schedule, and archives such as news.answers collected the results.
RFD: Short for Request For Discussion, the article that opens a Big 8 newsgroup proposal. It states the proposed name, charter, and moderation status, and is posted to news.groups.proposals for a discussion period in which the wording gets revised. If the proposal survives, a Call For Votes historically followed. The process is now run by the Big-8 Management Board and sees few proposals.
CFV: Short for Call For Votes, the article that formally opened balloting on a Big 8 group proposal after its Request For Discussion. Votes were mailed to a neutral votetaker, and the traditional threshold required at least a hundred more yes votes than no votes plus a two-thirds majority. The Big-8 Management Board later replaced open voting with board decision, so a CFV is now historical.
Usenet Volunteer Votetakers: The volunteers who ran ballots for Big 8 newsgroup proposals through the 1990s, collecting mailed votes, screening forged or duplicate ballots, and publishing the tally. Their neutrality was what made a vote count meaningful on a network with no central authority. The body wound down and the Big-8 Management Board took over group creation in 2006, ending the voting era entirely.
Big-8 Management Board: The small volunteer body that has administered creation, removal, and charter changes in the Big 8 hierarchies since 2006, replacing the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers and the open ballot. Proposals run through discussion in news.groups.proposals and are decided by the board rather than counted. Its decisions bind only administrators who choose to honour them, since every site controls its own active file.
Usenet Death Penalty: A coordinated refusal by news administrators to accept articles originating from a site that will not control abuse by its own users. Passive versions dropped the offending site's posts at each peer; active versions canceled them across the network. Announced with a deadline so the site could act first, it was applied to several large providers in the late 1990s and worked because propagation is voluntary.
NoCeM: A system of PGP-signed notices, pronounced no see em, listing message-IDs that an issuer considers spam or abuse. Readers and servers choose which issuers to trust and hide the listed articles locally. Unlike cancel messages, which anyone can forge and which destroy articles for everyone, NoCeM is advisory and cryptographically attributable. Support exists in INN and a few newsreaders, but use today is limited.
Sporgery: Spam forged to appear as though innocent third parties posted it, the name combining spamming and forgery. Large campaigns flooded targeted groups with thousands of articles carrying the real addresses of group regulars, redirecting the resulting complaints onto the victims. It made cancel-based cleanup dangerous, since deciding what to cancel meant deciding whose name was genuine, and it helped motivate cancel-lock and NoCeM.
Spam Cancel: A cancel message issued against a spam article by someone other than its author, historically the main cleanup mechanism once a post exceeded the Breidbart Index threshold of twenty. Issuers published their criteria and logs so their actions could be audited. Because cancels are trivially forged, the practice stayed contentious and declined; most servers now discard third-party cancels and rely on filters such as Cleanfeed.
Green Card Spam: The advertisement for immigration lottery services posted by lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel in April 1994, crossposted to thousands of newsgroups by script. Earlier commercial posts existed, but this was the first at that scale and the first its authors defended publicly. The reaction, angry mail and the earliest cancelbots, marks the start of Usenet's spam era and of organized anti-spam work.
Meow Wars: A cross-group harassment campaign running from 1996 into 1998, in which participants originating from alt.fan.karl-malden.nose flooded targeted groups with off-topic articles, the word meow, and forged posts. It escalated into sporgery and mailbombing and drove some groups into disuse. Now of historical interest, it is cited as an early case of coordinated online brigading and of how little defence unmoderated groups had.
Godwin's Law: Mike Godwin's 1990 observation that as a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis approaches one. Framed as a description of thread behavior, it hardened by convention into a rule that whoever made the comparison first had lost the argument. Godwin has repeatedly noted the original was meant to discourage careless analogies, not to bar historical comparison.
Kibology: The running joke religion built around James Parry, known as Kibo, whose habit of searching the entire incoming feed for mentions of his name and then replying made him a Usenet celebrity in the early 1990s. The group alt.religion.kibology mixed parody, wordplay, and dense in-jokes. It is remembered as a group whose subject was its own culture rather than any outside topic.
A News: The first Usenet software, written in 1979 by Steve Bellovin as shell scripts and rewritten in C by Stephen Daniel and Tom Truscott for the original Duke and UNC link. It stored each article as a file and assumed a network of a few dozen sites, with no separate index. Traffic outgrew it within two years, and B News replaced it in 1981. Purely historical.
B News: The second-generation news implementation, released in 1981 by Mark Horton and later maintained by Rick Adams. It introduced the header format that RFC 850 and then RFC 1036 standardized, handled far larger site counts than A News, and carried Usenet through the Great Renaming. C News and then INN displaced it across the late 1980s and 1990s, and no site runs it today.
C News: A rewrite of the news transport released in 1987 by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, aimed at the per-article processing cost that was choking B News sites. It handled articles in batches with much less overhead, which mattered when feeds arrived over UUCP dial-up. INN, designed around continuous NNTP connections instead, superseded it during the 1990s.
UUCP: Unix to Unix Copy, the store and forward file transfer system over dial-up modem links that carried Usenet before the network moved to NNTP over TCP/IP. Sites polled each other on a schedule, so an article might take days to cross the continent, and hop-by-hop routing produced bang path addresses. Extinct as a news transport, though its vocabulary survives in the Path header.
Backbone Cabal: The informal group of administrators at the large, well-connected sites carrying most Usenet traffic in the 1980s. Because their machines relayed feeds between regions, their decisions about which groups to accept effectively determined what propagated. They drove the Great Renaming, and resistance to that control produced the alt hierarchy. Denials of their existence became the joke there is no cabal. Dissolved around 1988.
Great Renaming: The reorganization of Usenet newsgroups across 1986 and 1987, moving them from the net, mod, and fa prefixes into the topical hierarchies comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, and talk. Backbone administrators drove it, partly to make feed selection manageable and partly to exclude controversial groups. The alt hierarchy was created immediately afterwards in reaction, and humanities was added later to complete the Big 8.
RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines, published in October 1995 as an informational document with no protocol force, collecting the conventions of mail, news, and other services in one place. Its news section covers trimming quotes, staying on topic, reading a group's FAQ, and marking personal opinion as such. Largely a snapshot of practice before the web took over, but still cited when netiquette questions arise.
EMP: Excessive Multi-Posting, the practice of sending substantively identical articles separately to many newsgroups instead of crossposting one article to all of them. It defeats the reader-side crosspost filtering that would otherwise show a message once, and it multiplies storage in every group. EMP is one of the two behaviors the Breidbart Index measures, and it counted as spam regardless of content.
ECP: Excessive Cross-Posting, naming so many groups in one article's Newsgroups header that the post cannot plausibly be on topic for most of them. Unlike multi-posting, a single article is stored once and readers see it once, so ECP was judged the lesser offence, though a message aimed at hundreds of groups still counted as spam. Both behaviors are scored together by the Breidbart Index.
Breidbart Index: A formula devised by Seth Breidbart for scoring how heavily a set of substantively identical articles spams the network. Each copy contributes the square root of the number of groups it names, summed across all copies, so multi-posting scores far higher than one wide crosspost. A score above twenty was the conventional threshold at which canceling the articles was considered justified.
Cancelbot: A program that scans the article stream for posts matching a spam pattern and issues cancel messages against them automatically. Cancelbots appeared in response to the 1994 green card spam and were run by individual volunteers, not by any authority. Their power to delete other people's articles, and the ease of forging cancels, kept them controversial; most servers now ignore third-party cancels entirely.
DejaNews: The web archive and search interface for Usenet launched in 1995, which for the first time made articles findable and readable long past the retention window of any news server. Its existence changed posting behavior, since casual remarks became durable and searchable, and it popularized the X-No-Archive header. Google bought the archive in 2001 and rebuilt it as Google Groups.
Google Groups: Google's web interface to the Usenet archive acquired from DejaNews in 2001, extended backwards with donated tapes reaching to 1981 and later merged with Google's own mailing list product. For years it was the default way to search old articles and, for many, to post. Google ended support for new Usenet content and posting in 2024, leaving the historical archive readable but static.
Usenet Archive: Any collection preserving Usenet articles beyond a server's retention window. Efforts range from the DejaNews corpus now held by Google, through the Internet Archive's copies of pre-1991 UUCP-era spools, to per-group mirrors run by individuals. Coverage is uneven and binary groups are generally excluded because of sheer size. X-No-Archive asked archivers to skip an article, though compliance was always voluntary.
YHBT: You Have Been Trolled, posted after someone answers bait sincerely, often expanded to YHBT, YHL, HAND: you have been trolled, you have lost, have a nice day. The formula announced that a thread was a setup and invited everyone to stop replying. Common in the late 1990s and rare now, though the underlying advice about not feeding trolls long outlived the abbreviation itself.
IMHO: In My Humble Opinion, marking a statement as personal judgement rather than asserted fact. IMO drops the humble, and IMNSHO makes the modesty sarcastic. RFC 1855 recommended flagging opinion this way to keep disagreements from escalating in a medium carrying no tone of voice. One of the few Usenet-era abbreviations that passed intact into ordinary email, chat, and messaging use.
Net Abbreviations: The compressed forms that developed on Usenet and earlier networks to save typing over slow links: BTW, FWIW, IIRC, AFAIK, OTOH, ROTFL and dozens more. Many groups kept a glossary in their FAQ, because unexplained abbreviations were a real barrier to new readers. A large share of them, including LOL and IMHO, outlived the medium and became general internet English.
Bang Path: The routing notation used before domain addressing, writing an address as a chain of hosts separated by exclamation marks, such as decvax!ucbvax!user. Each hop named the next machine a message should be handed to, because no global directory existed and UUCP links were point to point. Traces survive in the Path header, which still records the sites an article crossed. Obsolete as an address form.
Site Local Rules: The posting policies an individual news server imposes on its own users, separate from any network-wide convention: which hierarchies are carried, maximum article size, whether posting is permitted at all, and what abuse closes an account. Because Usenet has no central authority, these local rules are the only ones actually enforceable, and they vary widely between universities, ISPs, and commercial providers.
First Post: A reply whose entire content is a claim to have posted first in a thread or to a new group, contributing nothing else. Treated as noise on Usenet and a standard killfile target, the habit migrated to web comment sections and news aggregators where visible ordering made it more conspicuous. Propagation delays meant nobody on Usenet could actually establish who arrived first.
Necroposting: Replying to a thread dormant for months or years, usually after finding the old article through an archive or search result. It confuses readers whose newsreader shows the revived thread as current and answers questions the original poster stopped caring about long ago. The References header still threads the reply correctly, which is why an ancient subject suddenly reappears at the top of a group.
Off-Topic: Material outside the subject a group was created to cover, marked OT in the subject line when posted deliberately. Tolerance varied: some groups accepted tangents freely, others treated them as a charter violation warranting a complaint to the poster's administrator. Persistent off-topic posting was the commonest source of friction in unmoderated groups, where the only remedies were social pressure and killfiles.
Charter Violation: A post contradicting the stated purpose a newsgroup was created with, as recorded in its charter during the group creation process. In moderated groups the moderator rejects such articles outright; in unmoderated groups the charter carries only whatever weight regulars give it. Repeated violations were grounds for complaints to a poster's provider, and occasionally for proposals to remove or moderate the group.
The Cabal: The alleged secret group of administrators controlling Usenet, answered for decades with the phrase there is no cabal, abbreviated TINC. The joke worked because a backbone cabal really had held influence over propagation in the 1980s, making the denial simultaneously true, false, and impossible to disprove. It survives as shorthand for any suspected informal power structure in an online community.
Mail2News Gateway: A service that accepts an email message and injects it into a newsgroup, letting people post without an NNTP-capable server or a news account. Anonymous remailers commonly chained into one so a message reached Usenet carrying no identifying path. Because the gateways were easy to abuse for spam, most were shut down or restricted; a small number still operate for specific hierarchies.
News2Mail Gateway: A gateway running the opposite direction from mail2news, forwarding articles from a newsgroup out to email subscribers or to a mailing list address. It gave list members access to a group's traffic without a newsreader. Loop prevention matters, because a news2mail gateway paired with a mail2news gateway will echo the same messages back and forth indefinitely if headers are not checked.
Mailing List Gateway: A bidirectional bridge between a mailing list and a newsgroup, so list mail appears as articles and articles appear as list mail. Many comp hierarchy groups began as gateways to existing lists, and the fa prefix before the Great Renaming marked exactly that arrangement. Header translation, duplicate suppression, and keeping subscription requests out of the group are the recurring problems in running one.
BBS: Bulletin board system: a single computer running message board and file transfer software that callers reached directly by modem, usually one at a time. BBSes were the main alternative to Usenet for the same audience through the 1980s, and networks like FidoNet linked them into a store and forward mesh. Many later carried Usenet feeds. The web absorbed almost all of them by the late 1990s.
FidoNet: A store and forward network linking bulletin board systems from 1984, exchanging private netmail and public echomail conferences over nightly modem calls. Its structure paralleled Usenet's but ran on hobbyist microcomputers rather than Unix machines, and addressing used a numeric zone, net, and node form. Gateways passed traffic between the two networks. Still nominally alive with few nodes, but effectively historical.

See the full Usenet glossary.

Culture & History

Put it into practice with the world's best usenet service