Webring Pet Peeves

I recently started and then promptly gave up on trying to list every single small/independent webring and web directory I could find. Was it worth it? I don't know, but now that I've seen and catalogued so many of them, I wanted to share some observations.

I wish more people thought about what kind of directory (a webring, a fanlisting, a standard web directory, etc.) suits their needs best before just going out and doing it. A lot of these ringmasters seem to be pretty young, and most webrings are just for fun, so I'm not angry at them or anything, but I do find it annoying that the same issues keep happening over and again and no one ever seems to learn from them.

The point of a webring is that it's a ring. If even one person's site goes down, then the whole thing breaks! The more people there are, the more sites you have to keep tabs on. A common issue I saw was webrings getting way too big. Too many people would join and then the ringmaster would have to close new member applications because they either couldn't keep up with that much interest, or didn't have the time/energy to go through >100 sites regularly to make sure the ring was still working.

One ring I saw, the Neocreatives Webring, was smart enough to transition from being a ring to a regular directory when the member count got too high, instead of just shutting down, but I can't help but wonder why so many webrings weren't just standard directories in the first place. Especially since a lot of them have very vague/general themes that attract a lot of people.

A lot of webrings I found were centered around being fans of a certain thing. Most of them had a rule like "You must be a fan of x, but you don't need any content relating to it on your site". That's more or less the same rules that fanlistings operate under. Fanlistings also tend to have a lot of people in them, and the scripts they run on accommodate for that. I wonder why so many people don't just make fanlistings instead.

Maybe younger people just don't know what they are? I found this FanLore page explaining what they are, but they don't have Wikipedia pages like webrings and web directories do. Maybe someone should put together a beginners guide for that? I'd do it myself but I really don't feel like starting another project right now.

It also kind of annoys me that so many webrings will link sites to each other that have absolutely nothing in common. I guess for some people that's part of the charm, the internet being a true "wild west" and never knowing what you're going to see next. Personally, I use webrings to find sites that cover similar topics, so I prefer when there's some cohesion. To each their own, I guess.

Anyway, I don't dislike webrings, I just wish people were a little more intentional about them. Think about what features are really necessary, how you'll deal with potential problems, and so on.