| A few day ago, I noticed that some of my webring sites on webring.org were getting
suspended. This seems to happen occasionally with webring.org - I've concluded there is something odd about it's ring
checker - but this was far more than the usual number of sites. First a dozen, then probably a hundred or so. (I have
about 5,000 "sites", actually a hundred or so sites spread across about 500 rings).
So I looked closer this time and found the following error:
Note: This site has been reviewed by Webring staff and has been determined to be a "one way" (or hidden or invalid
but PASSing code) site, and as a result it will be treated as a FAIL until this is corrected. That is, the navigation
code has been placed on a page that is not accessible from the content area of your web site. So, people landing on your
site will never see any links to the Ring(s) you belong to. As a result your site can only take traffic away from the
Ring(s) you belong to, and can never bring any traffic to the Ring(s). This should be easy to correct. Place the
navigation code on the content page(s) of your web site. The single navbar option that allows you to display just one
navbar in case you belong to many Rings enables you to limit the space the navigation code occupies on your web site, so
placing it where your content is can be done in the least intrusive manner possible. Whenever changing the registered
URL be sure that your navigation code does not need to be changed, or if it does that you use the current version of the
code. If you edit the registered URL via the edit link on the View Web Sites page you can change the registered URL
without affecting the U#, thus ensuring that the same code will be valid on the new URL
Now I don't know about everyone else, but I find this error annoying in the extreme. What business is it of some
unnamed "webring staff" that my webring page is not reachable (or is)? Shouldn't this be an issue for a ringmaster? Might
it be possible that a ringmaster actually approves a ring with this "problem"?
As far as the suggestion to place webring.org fragments on a content page, don't be silly. My experience is these
fragments increase the load times of pages by several times. When the webring.org server has been down on occasion, the
fragment causes page loads to take several minutes! So my policy is my own rings and RingSurf rings and Bravenet rings can
go on content pages, but not these silly JavaScript fragments.
Even more irritating was the absolute gall of this webring staff to suspend sites on MY RINGS. I am the ringmaster, yet
they are using some arbitrary standard to suspend my own sites on my own rings!!! I AM THE RINGMASTER. I will decide what
is and is not a valid site on my own rings, and no one else has that right. Period.
Yet one more reason to host my own rings on my own server...
Sigh.
Thanks for listening to my rant.
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