So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

Ah, I'm sure all of you know the euphoria that comes from making and implementing a decision that you've been chewing on for months (or years). I've been going back and forth on stay/not stay, go/no go from webring for a long time. I've been getting more and more annoyed with webring for many different reasons, actually beginning with the yahoo rape. It is not that they were wrong and I was right - it was a different in philosophies and operating style.

Anyway, today I **finally** made the decision and left webring for good. My rings have all been transferred and I no longer use webring at all. They did not provide a way for me to delete my memberships, so they will have to deal with an account with 2900 memberships, all to webring.com, themselves. I was not about to go through and hand-delete 2900 entries just because they would not give me a clean way to delete the account.

I gave the members of a couple of my rings the option of moving to my own privately hosted rings, and about 10% have taken advantage of that so far. I expect about 20% to sign on eventually.

What pushed me to this momentous decision (well, actually it's not that important)? It all began with the Yahoo takeover and rape of webring in the year 2000, a day known as Black Tuesday. I remained in spite of the chaos because I had spent large amounts of time building my rings and didn't feel like throwing that way. Also, I felt like I was a part of a community of like-minded people fighting a great wrong, largely unnoticed in the rest of the world but very important to us.

A couple of years later, Webring quietly changed hands to a small group of individuals, who apparently had a dream to create the perfect webring machine. They began with the model that Yahoo had implemented - Server-loaded JavaScript fragments.

Webring went through some bumpy times but soon settled down. By late 2003, it was evident that these people had created the perfect webring machine. Everything could be put on autopilot - as far as I could tell, human beings were not necessary at all.

Yet I found Webring to be very annoying. They were a commercial entity (see Webring Baggage) and the constant advertising presence was annoying. Some of their decisions, such as the "uniqueness index", which seemed to arbitrarily lower the value of joining many webrings, were annoyances.

I began to get the feeling that the webrings that I managed (on webring.org) did not belong to me. It was disheartening to realize that a ring could be "seized" by webring at any time for whatever reason they wanted without notice. This thought was in the back of my mind as I worked to improve my rings, promote them and build them into communities.

In June of 2004, I received notification (see An Annoying Webring Error) that some of my ring memberships were suspended because the fragment was invalid. I was annoyed but not alarmed until I realized that this was not an automated error. Someone from webring had actually looked at my site and decided the ring fragment was on a one-way page.

Even so, I was fine with this until I realized that this applied to MY OWN SITES IN MY OWN RING. This rubbed into my face the obvious fact that the rings that I was building did not belong to me. I was the ringmaster, but someone else was making decisions about my creations.

Enough was enough. It was time to leave webring, forever.

Now I will use ring systems that more fit my personal philosophy of what the internet and web should be.

Of course my own rings fit that bill. RingSurf is a useful alternative and I will continue to run RingSurf rings and join them as well. I like RingSurf and feel it is a nice fit for what I am trying to accomplish.

Bravenet also is a good choice for much the same reason.

The Rail is a limited but useful surfing method.

Other privately hosted rings are also useful and many fit well into this scheme.

I have not looked closely at the "other" rings systems, but perhaps now I will have the time and motivation to see if these will work as well.

So for better or for worse, a long, turbulent chapter in my life is gone for good.