Webring is no longer part of Yahoo? Right. I'll believe that.
On 05 September 2000, Yahoo began its disastrous administration of the WebRing system, a five-year-old free online service and community. People left Y!WR in droves. Some headed to RingSurf. Some headed to the Bomis system. Many either installed RingLink, or signed up with previously-installed RingLink systems. Even with the mass migrations, there were still lots of rings using the Y!WR system…it seemed. As the months wore on, many of them turned out to be abandoned.
Now, apparently, WebRing is no longer part of the Yahoo conglomerate. I’m not really sure about this one, though. True, when trying to reach the Y!WR home, there are l-o-n-g delays and then a switch to this WebRing.com…but that might just mean that someone’s suborned the DNS information.
Other reasons for wondering about this:
- the page layout of this new WebRing is very similar to Yahoo. Wouldn’t new owners want to make more of a difference by changing the look and feel of the pages - possibly back to the old Webring colourscheme?
- the information on the WebRing.com pages is a little scanty-looking. I could create this content. It doesn’t really seem to reassure me that it’s genuine.
- the DNS record lists Yahoo, Inc. as the holder of the domain webring.com (and webring.net and webring.org) and has these domains listed as being on yahoo’s nameservers
- I can’t find any other evidence or news about this move other than the email I received and this scanty text on the web site
I think that WebRing is still owned by Yahoo - possibly even being administered by the same group of nimrods - but Yahoo is just trying to stem the hemmoraging of outgoing former members by pulling this switcheroo. So while I would welcome another ring hosting service (RingSurf was abandoned by its chief some months back, and while the various Guides do good jobs, there are a lot of duplicate rings, rings that are abandoned, rings that are really nothing more than links to someone’s home page [note: ring hosts are NOT search engines!], and in short, lots of noise, not a whole lot of signal. The Guides can only do so much — they can’t dictate policy or clean up dead rings or things like that. But…until I get some sort of confirmation that this new Webring is legit, and unless I see that those bloody NavBars are only an option and not the only way to create ring fragments, I’ll just stay with RingSurf.
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