[dragontamer]

You click until you find a broken link in the chain and then everything goes to crap.

When you have A, B, C, D, and E, all different webmasters on different parts of the internet making a webring of A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> A, things get really messed up when C stops responding to emails.

As others have said: you need a ringmaster for this to work. When C stops responding to emails, you tell B to update their page and point to D, for example.

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We have so many more technologies today than we did in the 90s. I don't know why anyone would look back at freaking Webrings when we have... I dunno... Wikis?

Now the Wiki administrator (A), could recruit B, C, D, and E to be moderators on the same Wiki. When C stops responding to emails, everything keeps going just fine.

Etc. etc.

I don't think anyone who actually lived in the 90s with directory services, Ask Jeeves, and Webrings would ever think about bringing those services back. Like, the good stuff were IRC, AIM, IRQ, USENET ?

[amlib]

I think you have missed the point, it's more about decentralization and increasing "locality" of the internet, get people close to each other or with shared interest to have their own communities. Webrings may not be all that great of solution technically but it does the job in that front.

Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :)

[dragontamer]

> Like in your wiki example, if A falls, now you don't have A B C D E F... well, the whole alphabet is gone :)

Its far more likely for random individuals of a webring to disappear in my experience.

Ex: A could be the starting point of the webring. When C disappears, then D, E, and F are inaccessible. (A -> B -> Broken page).

A wiki is a single point of failure: you make A more reliable so that everyone has the information. A webring is an infinite number of single points of failure: a single failure (broken link / 404, etc. etc.) messes the entire ring up. Its horrible.

[bluSCALE4]

Webrings don't have to be maintained, they just have to be up. They are snapshots in time that provide lots of information. Authors typically put in a lot of effort, unfiltered. The individuals voice shining through is the goal, learning more through links is a plus.