My decision with respect to Yahoo!

Consider this for a moment. There were over 80,000 webrings in existence on Webring.Org on Black Tuesday (September 5, 2000), with member sites numbering in the millions. If you don't believe those numbers, think about it for a minute. How many sites (especially personal web pages and the like) have you not seen a webring fragment on? In fact, on most sites there were two, three or even a dozen ring fragments!

Now think on the millions of man (and woman) hours that have been put into creating new rings: 

• setting up the ring join pages, 
• writing dissertations about the ring philosophy, 
• promoting to get new members, 
• helping new members understand what a ring is and patiently working them through the add process
• And countless other activities related to building and maintaining web communities.

As you can see, there was a lot of creative energy and effort put into rings. Many rings that I have examined are pure acts of love and a desire to mesh sites together in some common cause. Many rings were (and still are) things of such great beauty that it takes my breath away.

I am reminded of a massive fight that's been occurring in my own neighborhood now for over 20 years. The 710 freeway project (in South Pasadena, California, a small conservative city near Los Angeles) has never been completed. There are 2.5 miles of freeway missing from the north end. This is terribly inconvenient to thousands of people every day - they have to drive a whole extra few miles because of the missing concrete ribbon.

The people of South Pasadena don't want this freeway finished, and they have successfully fought it off for 20 years. There have been countless court battles, endless promotional campaigns and hundreds of public meetings all attempting to get this freeway finished or stop it's completion.

What's the problem? To build the freeway requires tearing down hundreds of old houses, many of which are historical monuments, digging huge gashes in the ground and essentially ending a wonderful community that has worked long and hard to create a safe, beautiful environment for it's people.

What the people of South Pasadena do understand is that freeways are indeed good things ... they are a great transportation system. However, what they do is divide cities, forever changing the communities that exist in their path. A freeway can be a huge wall which fosters vast divisions between the people who live on either side. And just look at the communities which used to prosper along route 66: most of the business died when the new freeways were built. Those that survived are just ghosts of their former glory!

I used to live in Lake Arrowhead (a community at the top of a one mile high mountain range about 100 miles from Los Angeles, California), which made a different decision. They had this small, winding, charming road which started in San Bernardino and worked it way up the side of the mile-high mountain to the communities on top. Someone decided to replace this road with a huge four-lane freeway. This monster took years to build and is an engineering monument to mankind's ability to build anything anywhere it wants to.

In the years since the completion of the freeway Lake Arrowhead has grown tremendously. The population has gone from 10,000 people to over 60,000 people in just a generation! They now have a huge mall with an equally huge parking lot and lots of commercial activities for everyone.

Yes, when I go up to Lake Arrowhead I always take the old road. Yes, they left the old road there, presumably for people just like me. The different is astounding. On the freeway your mission is to get from A to B. The freeway is perfection in transportation. The old road is a beautiful driving experience: tree's arching overhead, the smell of pine in the air, small streams babbling with actual fish swimming and lots of places to stop and enjoy he surroundings.

And that really illustrates the different between the old webring system and the new Yahoo! webring system. The new webring system is designed to get people from site to site without any bother or hassle. No side trips, no stops, no differences. It's just one gigantic, monolithic transportation system. Individual creativity does not mean squat - the only thing that matters is getting from A to B, while looking at the billboards, of course.

The main difference between the building of freeways and the webring is that with freeways (especially in these modern times) communities and people get a chance to attend public meetings, listen to the reasons for the freeway, understand the issues and make their own feelings known. And if they agree, they can green-light the freeway (as they did Lake Arrowhead). If they disagree, they can protest and perhaps keep it from happening. It is their community that will be changed, after all, and they deserve at least the chance to make their feelings known.

To my knowledge, no ringmaster was asked his opinion. No public forums were created asking for input on what should be changed and how the changes should occur. No input was solicited from anyone outside Yahoo!, to my knowledge. The vague emails from Yahoo! issued before the change imply that complaints were examined, but if you base changes only on complaints you are going to get some strange results...especially in the area of software and computer systems.

In addition, the lack of field testing and good design is, quite frankly, inexcusable and intolerable. I have been designing and implementing systems for 22 years now, and I completely know how to make a project work. Yahoo! has the resources and power to do a project correctly. They could have released a good, well designed, completely working system on day one. I have done it myself and I have seen it done.

The fact that the webring system was so broken for so long and still, over a month later, suffers from severe design flaws, indicates how amateurish and unprofessional these people at Yahoo! truly are.  The complete irresponsibility of making such monumental blunders would, had this been in the public sector, produced massive hearings, trials and firings. While it's quite true that bugs do happen with software, I know from personal experience that with a good design, adequate testing, solid quality assurance and competent people any project, no matter how large, can go perfectly.

So to answer the question: will I be moving my webrings? I already have moved them. I am keeping the old ones available until January 1, 2001. On that day, I will delete every webring of which I am a ringmaster to protest Yahoo!'s bungling and malicious destruction of the webring system.