The webring
1996. A circle of sites you walk yourself, with no index, no search and no owner. Except for the part where every link in it went to a single script on one company's server.
Seven verbs, and five of them are about failure
The block a member pasted into their own page, copied byte for byte off geocities.com/EnchantedForest/1001/webrings.html, captured 9 October 1999.
[<a href="...?ring=efccring;id=1;sprev" target="top">Skip Prev</a>]
[<a href="...?ring=efccring;id=1;prev" target="top">Prev</a>]
[<a href="...?ring=efccring;id=1;next" target="top">Next</a>]
[<a href="...?ring=efccring;id=1;skip" target="top">Skip Next</a>]
[<a href="...?random;ring=efccring" target="top">Random</a>]
[<a href="...?ring=efccring;id=1;next5" target="top">Next 5</a>]
[<a href="...?ring=efccring;list" target="top">List Sites</a>]Prev and Next are the ring. The other five are admissions. Skip Prev and Skip Next step over a member who is gone. Random gives up on the sequence. Next 5 is for when you do not trust your neighbor to be worth the click. List Sites is a directory, quietly, inside the thing that was supposed to replace directories.
Now look at the query string. id=1 is your own position in the ring, hard coded into the HTML on your page. You are not linking to your neighbor. You do not know who your neighbor is. You are telling a central script which chair you are sitting in and asking it who comes next.
Why it needed to exist at all
The usual story is that webrings were a nicer alternative to search. That is in the founder's pitch, but it is not the problem he says the service solves. From webring.org, earliest capture 19 October 1996:
Obviously, this is something that anyone [can do] simply by getting together with a few other people and having each person add a link to their page pointing to the next person in the loop. However, when somebody wants to join the ring, someone has to edit their page to point to the new page and, when the ring gets big enough, it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring "intact" when pages go down.
A hand-made ring breaks the moment one member disappears, and on the old web members disappeared constantly, because the default state of a link is broken. The service was not built to be a better directory. It was built to route around holes.
All Webrings are run off of a single CGI program located here at webring.org. This means that no complicated CGI programming is necessary, it's all been done for you.
webring.org, Creating a Ring, capture 19 October 1996
Offered as a convenience, and it is true. It is also the trade. The topology was a ring. The architecture was a hub. No index, no owner, and one company's script standing between every pair of members.
Joining was a favor a person did for you
Even with the CGI, membership was not automatic. These are the instructions from the Marines Around The World ring, captured 3 February 1999, spelling theirs:
- Fill out the form below
- Add the HTML Fragment (found below, on page after you press 'submit', and in confirm email)
- Email the ringmistress at
caroline111@hotmail.comwith "Add to ring from Queue" in the subject line. Include your ID#, and site URL/name - Wait for an email saying you were entered into the ring!
A queue, a ringmistress, and a wait. The same page bans "No phonography" and "No Swearing (PG/G Rated Please!)", and asks for "Retiered Marine(s)". Those are her spellings, kept, because a moderation policy typed by one person at a hotmail address is the texture that gets sanded off when this era is retold. Your membership was a favor, granted by hand and withdrawable the same way. Different from a follow button, and not straightforwardly better.
Field marks
How to know one when you see it. Each specimen below is the real thing, not a description of it.
Square brackets doing layout
Typed literally into the HTML between anchors. Not a border, not a list, just punctuation holding the shape.
...?ring=efccring;id=1;nextA number in the URL that means you
Your own index, pasted into your own page. It is the only thing telling the ring where you stand.
Skip verbs in the navigation
A ring old enough to have lost members offers a way to step over them. A UI feature admitting the content is rotting.
An image the ring gave you
Hosted on your own server, with the ring's name in alt and often nowhere else on the page.
| [Prev] [Next] [Random] [List Sites] |
A bordered table at the very bottom
After the content and usually after the counter, one pixel of border, and a background color that matches nothing else on the site.
What it solved, and what took it
A webring put you inside a set of pages chosen by a person who cared about the subject, in an order that was nobody's ranking. You could walk the whole thing and know you had seen all of it. No algorithm, because there was nothing to optimize, and no account, because membership was an email to a stranger.
What it traded was a single point of failure it never advertised as one. The piece you actually owned was a table of links pointing at somebody else's server, with your position number typed inside it. When that server changed hands, every ring on it changed hands at once, and the members found out by reading their own pages.
A circle you could walk end to end and be certain you had seen all of it.