Webrings were a huge part of my life almost a decade ago. I was venturing into the vast, somewhat intimidating world of the internet for the first time, and ran across a site containing a webring. I was attempting to create my own site, and perhaps make a little spending money, and was intersted in learning anything about getting people to my site.
This was in the days before the domination of the internet by the huge search engines. I didn't know anything about SEO anyway, and it all seemed very complicated.
Webrings were very simple and easy-to-comprehend. You ask to join, you get accepted, you add the code to your site. What could be easier?
I started withwebring.org, way before yahoo maimed the concept and nade it thoroughly useless for anything. I quickly discovered bravenet, ringsurf and all the other competing formats.
I never understood how those early ring systems intended to make income. It was obviously via advertising, but the ads were so sparse and so subtle that it never really made sense to me.
Another factor, a big one, that spurred my ventures into the world of rings was the social aspect. At the time I had a very, very sick wife, a demanding stepson and a hugely stressful job. Webrings and the communities around them gave me a way to have some social interaction via email and similar methods. I became a prolific poster on forums and wrote emails like crazy.
In their original form, back in the days of starseed, webrings did generate traffic. At least those managed by starseed did (the other ring systems never did that much, traffic wise, for me). Once yahoo raped the concept and destroyed forever the value of rings, any idea of gaining visitors became a distant dream.
In deperation, I changed all of my rings over to a new system called ringlink, a self-hosted version called ringlink. It worked well, although as a traffic generator ringlink never really succceeded. Ringlink could not create that sense of community as did the original webring.
After webring changed hands again and was moved to some of the original team from starseed, I breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed like my hopes had been fulfilled.
Unfortunately, the rape of yahoo had shattered webring and instead of being saviors, the new owners more resembled the gestapo. After spending much time trying to make it work, I deleted all my webrings from webring.orgin complete disgust.
I happily managed my dozen or so ringlink rings for another year or so. My pleasure didn't last, however, as I started getting webring spam. A lot of it. Webring spam is sites submitted that have nothing to do with the ring subject, usually drug or porn sites. I was getting dozens of these each week.
To make matters worse, I found some of the sites in my rings were changing. You see, a ringmaster must occasionally check the ring sites for a number of reasons. I was alarmed more and more and I discovered many sites in my rings had changed hands and become, without fail, porn sites.
So I decided my rings would remain but would only service my own sites. I closed them all to new submissions, and, after a year of weeding out the spammy porn sites, deleted all sites that I didn't own myself. Since I maintain over 100 sites, this still left me with substantial sized rings.
lately I have done a very thorough rework of all of my sites. I've been cleaning up the code, implementing CSS and XHTML and ASP to ease maintrnance and make it all more professional looking.
After much reflection, I decided it was time for the rings to go completely. My inter-site navigation was excellent so they were not needed anymore. They bloat the code on my pages and look ugly.
I was a little sad as I removed the ring code from all my sites and all my pages. I finally deleted the entire ringlink installation. Rings are a part of my past and they are not a part of my future.
The deed is done - webring is dead. Long live webring.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.