History Of WebRings

Denis kept it simple. If you wanted to be added, you created a page for EUROPa, then emailed the person from whom you took the page asking to be added. That person "added" you by modifying his link to the next site to you.

A year later, in June of 1995, another young man by the name of Sage Weil stumbled on the EUROPa ring and felt that he could improve on the concept. He decided he could write a CGI program that would automate the process of adding sites to the ring. Later, Jerry Hierro suggested a centralized CGI program, and thus the WebRing system was born. The first WebRing was called ESLoop.

In 1997 WebRing was sold to a company called Starseed, Inc, which was based in Ashland, Oregon. By this time there were over a thousand rings, and by 1998 there were over 10,000. In the year 2000, the number of rings topped 80,000!

In late 1998, a company called GeoCities bought Starseed for 775,000 shares of stock and $2 million in cash, and thus acquired the WebRing system.  GeoCities had a lot of money and knowledge, and thus quickly took advantage of and improve the WebRing system. GeoCities felt that they could use WebRing to cause people to navigate from site to site, thus improving traffic and increasing their revenue from ad impressions. They had grand ideas and felt they could do a lot with their new property.

Unfortunately, in 1999 GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo! for $2.87 billion in stock, effectively destroying yet another fine company. They had their eye on the 3.5 million free, personal home pages, which were seen as a huge revenue stream (from banner ads). Since WebRing was owned by GeoCities, it was acquired as well.

For about a year, Yahoo made no changes of any significance to WebRing, although there were rumors that something was going to happen (something really big). Something great and wonderful, according to the few and vague announcements that were sent out to ring masters and members.

The rumors alarmed some members of the ring community enough that a group was formed. The purpose of this group was to create an alternative ring system, which became known as Ringlink. The concept was much more distributed than WebRing - instead of a central database and a server farm, Ringlink was to be installed on each webmaster's site. This, combined with the open source philosophy, created a huge demand and an excellent alternative.

On September 5, 2000, after several months of rumors, Yahoo! unveiled it's "new and improved" WebRing system, which featured something called a Server Side Navigation Bar (SSNB). The changes were huge (as promised) and they changed the concept of the Webring forever. Unfortunately, a brilliant opportunity was wasted as the change was incredibly poorly planned, designed and implemented. 

You see, Yahoo made a dramatic change to the focus of the WebRing system. Up until this time, a webring was a way for surfers to navigate from site to site, and the central location was the Ring Master's site. The WebRing system was peripheral to everything, more or less just running the show. In fact, it was not necessary for surfers to have anything to do with WebRing at all. It was almost completely invisible to them, except when listing out sites.

Yahoo changed all of this by creating the concept of a central hub. From this day forward, surfers would be enticed and practically driven to the main site by the new Server Side Navigation Bar. Yahoo had decided that it needed to make money from WebRing directly, and to do so it needed to change it so that banners ads could be shown. Since banners were not to be displayed on the SSNB (apparently Yahoo! at least had enough sense not to try that), the surfers had to be directed to a place where advertisements could be shown.

Within 12 days, 1,500 web rings were in the process of moving to several alternate ring providers, primarily RingSurf and SiteRing, and hundreds more shut down entirely. For the full story on this historical event, see the article series beginning with "The Death Of Webring - Black Tuesday".

Thus began a sad saga of ill-planned changes, rebellion and feuding which in many ways continues through this day. Predictably, Yahoo's attempt to generate income from WebRing failed miserably, primarily because Yahoo! really didn't have a clue about how to make money from it at all.  As the year 2000 changed to 2001, Yahoo began struggling for survival, and the forgotten, small, ill-mannered adopted child called WebRing was forgotten and finally ordered shut down. 

This was a very hard time for the WebRing concept of navigation. A brilliant idea which burst on the web with such promise had been ruthlessly destroyed in a matter of a few months by a greedy, uncaring corporation. WebRings became shunned by surfers and webmasters alike, associated more with spam than with any real navigation system. The wreckage left scars on hundreds of thousands of sites, fragments of rings that no longer worked, resembling broken bridges and milestones from the old Roman roads after the barbarians did their damage.

One man named James Huggins performed a massive experiment designed to determine the limits of the Yahoo! Webring system. He started the "wazillion navbars" project, and joined as many webrings as he could. By the time the project was completed, James had joined over 3,000 webrings, and had definitely hit the limits. In fact, he found quite a few bugs - and he certainly succeeded in annoying the Webring owners by pointing out their errors.

The alternative ring systems prospered, more or less benefiting greatly from the Rape of WebRing. RingSurf gained the most, as tens of thousands of rings were successfully moved over to their well-oiled system. At first it was rough, as RingSurf in no way anticipated the huge demands on their servers, but they quickly added more capacity and handled the new traffic well. SiteRing proved that it was a good and useful system, although it was more obscure than RingSurf and didn't gain anywhere near as much. And the newly written Ringlink system held it's own and became the premier webring system on the internet. Ringlink had the advantage in that it was infinitely expandable and completely independent of a central hub or server farm. Thus, it could not be controlled or shut down or changed by any one corporation or person.

In the meantime, Yahoo! planned the shutdown of the WebRing system. At first they simply wanted to pull the plug on the servers, eliminating webrings entirely from the web.  However, a miracle happened - an ex-WebRing employee stepped forward and offered to take WebRing over. An undisclosed (although undoubtedly small) amount of money was paid and the transfer was planned.

Thus, in October of 2001, Yahoo announced that it had sold WebRing to a "former employee of Starseed" named Tim, who apparently felt that WebRing was worth saving. He purchased enough bandwidth and a large enough server (or perhaps several servers) to host the system, and another great migration of rings from the "old" WebRing system owned by Yahoo to the "new" WebRing system owned by Tim began.

The new WebRing didn't look that different from Yahoo - it had server-side navigation bars just like the old one, and it had a host of problems. One of the major differences, though, was the new WebRing appeared to actually have someone in charge who cared, so many of the issues and problems seemed to be solved relatively quickly.

In the meantime, alternative solutions have continued their growth. Ringlink has quickly become the premier ring system, with a huge array of features, good support and extreme simplicity. RingSurf looks the most like the old pre-Yahoo system, and for a time was a fine alternative with fast servers, lots of features and good documentation. Bravenet's siterings are very well done and well supported.

For a brief instant, it appeared that rings were back, better than before. Hope welled in the souls of the ringmasters who remembered the glory days from years before. Perhaps, once the various ring systems went through their growing pains, the war was won. Perhaps there was a viable future for rings after all.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. It quickly became obvious that the Gestapo had moved their headquarters to Webring. Their system expanded, stabilized, and became so simple to use that it actually became worse than useless. Spammers appeared in droves, and senseless rules were created in desperate attempts to solve the various problems introduced by an essentially worthless, although very well done, webring machine.

You see, the basic problem which has never acknowledged or addressed by the new Webring, is the SSNB and the concept of a stack. This means a ring member adds one fragment to his page, and then every single ring he joins is "stacked" by that fragment, all in a huge list on the page. This, combined with an exceptionally easy-to-use interface, made it so trivial to create and join rings that tens of thousands of worthless rings existed, and many webmasters joined thousands of them.

Rings survive based upon the number of surfers using them to move from site to site. This is even more true with WebRing.Org, as it requires this surfing to generate advertising dollars. Surfers, however, still stinging from the Yahoo rape, quickly figured out that the quality of webrings had dropped into the toilet, and they responded by ignoring them completely.

WebRing.Org responded by creating dozens of inane rules. They created a strange "quality" rating for ringmasters, limited the number of sites joined, and even had the hall to suspend rings and sites without warning which didn't measure up to their standards.

The worst offense of all was that deleted rings didn't stay deleted. They were mysteriously resurrected and out up for adoption. Due to this and other totalitarian rules and procedures, it became plain that a ring belonged to WebRing.Org and not a ringmaster. As this fact dawned on the ring community, the intelligent ringmasters, those who actually spent time depending their rings, began to search for other alternatives. After all, why create something only to get arbitrary rules thrown at you, to have your creations seized without warning and to not even have the right to shut down your own creation?

While this drama was occurring, RingSurf went through it's own changes. After the initial flood of new sites and rings after the Yahoo pillage, RingSurf seemed to go on autopilot. Literally nothing at all happened for a long, long time, until one day it was purchased and the interface completely rewritten. It seemed someone else had the idea to generate some income from the ring concept.

RingSurf didn't make the same mistake as WebRing; they maintained the original concept of issuing a new fragment for each site in a ring (in other words, they did not use an SSNB). This was relatively close to the old concept of pre-Yahoo webrings, with the same advantages and disadvantages.

Bravenet's SiteRings more or less remained unchanged. Bravenet didn't seem to place any importance on their rings at all. SiteRings simply are another offering in the toolbox of services that Bravenet offers to entice webmasters. To my knowledge, they have spent no time at all on the concept after it's initial creation.

Ringlink stabilized and slowly grew in popularity because it is, truthfully, the only rational ring system on the market. Ringlink is stable, flexible and totally under the control of the ringmaster. There is no question who owns a ring, who controls it and who makes the rules. The ringmaster is free from the totalitarian, Gestapo-like atmosphere of WebRing.Org, from the uncaring, autopilot of RingSurf and the blissful nothingness of SiteRings.

What will the future bring? In my opinion, Yahoo's Rape of WebRing and the bumbling of the new owners pretty much destroyed the concept, at least in the eyes of the majority of webmasters and surfers. The changes were too fast and furious, too many and too often. The debris of broken ring fragments and bad feelings will last for many years.

Webrings are now considered to be spam by most webmasters; Surfers consider them, as a rule, to be meaningless placeholders on pages. They increase page load time (dramatically in the case of WebRing.Org rings) with little benefit.

With the advent of new, exceptionally powerful, search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo, it is plain that the ring concept has been reduced to a pale glimmer of it's former, all-to-brief, glory.