[swatcoder]

> maintain them

Maintain what?

They’re documents. They document things. As long as there’s a tool that knows how to parse the document, which is outside the role of the author, the document remains complete. There’s nothing to maintain.

The contemporary fetish for timely ephemera is a quirk of social media feeds and a generation that grew up immersed in them, not some baseline criteria for how the internet needs to work.

As automated search engines and social media feeds continue to drown in spam and engagement-porn, expect to see a resurgence of hand-curated web rings, directories, and marginalia-like scoped search engines, that variously highlight timely, historical, and evergreen content.

You’ll be surprised what an untouched document from 5 or 15 or 25 years ago might reveal to you, once you can actually find them again.

[dragontamer]

> Maintain what?

Okay, you're kidding me right? Have you actually used Webrings?

Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links?

Answer: you can't. Its basically lost information. Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses.

There's a __reason__ why we stopped doing Webrings when Geocities stopped being popular. I've lived Geocities -> Homestead -> Xenga -> Myspace -> Facebook. At no point did anyone ever care to go back to webrings.

And suddenly here we are like 20+ years later, where people who clearly never used them are suddenly pretending that it was webrings that made the early internet great. Erm, no. I guess they were a sign of the times... but they weren't good or great by any means. We have better means of sharing links with each other today.

--------

Links die. Alarmingly quickly. Even today where people try to have long-lived links for SEO purposes and have specifically programmed scripts to help make links live longer... links still die and thus webrings break.

We didn't know how bad link-rot was at the time of webrings.

> You’ll be surprised what an untouched document from 5 or 15 or 25 years ago might reveal to you, once you can actually find them again.

Good luck. Geocities literally died. Yes, there's an entire archival process was undertaken to try to save Geocities, but I'm sure we missed some info.

Any webring pointing to a Geocities site today will absolutely 404 error out. You've already got to change all the links to point to the various archives (ex: Neocities IIRC has at least the most popular pages archived).

Now I ask: were you really around for the time of webrings?

[swatcoder]

> were you really around for the time of webrings?

Yup.

> Webrings require ALL the web-administrators in the ring to keep their previous-and-next links up-to-date, otherwise the whole ring collapses.

Nope. Not then, when IFRAMEs or a pre-CORS AJAX call delegated ring maintenance upstream, and not now, when we have about 1500 more ways to delegate it. Was there a short period where they were as crude as you describe? Sure, but that's not really relevant to the forward-looking discussion of what they would look like now or the backward-looking discussion of what they looked like in the many years where they were mature and popular.

[constantly]

I can’t arbitrate here, but can add my anecdote to bolster what the person above is saying: I regularly remember clicking next on webrings and eventually getting a 404 with no way to progress. This was fairly regular to the extent that I sometimes just avoided clicking the webring modal.

[autoexec]

Yeah, I remember it both ways. Sometimes you'd click on a link at the bottom of one page to hit a dead end, but you could also go to the homepage of the webring itself and you could navigate through the sites in an iframe where you'd still run into a bunch of 404s, but you'd at least still have a "next" button in a separate frame so you could roll the dice again.

Webrings require maintenance to be useful and worth using, just like search engines do. The better maintained and curated they are, the more useful they will be.

[dragontamer]

> just like search engines do

Given how easy it is to run PostgreSQL and full text search these days, I think boutique search engines for small communities makes more sense than a webring.

[praisewhitey]

>Lets say I click on a webring, and the "next" button goes to a 404 error. Now what? How do I access all the other links?

An example of this from the OP link. The page links to a11y-webring.club which has prev/next/random buttons that all produce this error:

This function has crashed

An unhandled error in the function code triggered the following message:

Runtime.UserCodeSyntaxError - SyntaxError: Unexpected token ':'

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

Imagine if this criticism was levied at books.

James Clavell obviously doesn't care about Shogun, why ... it hasn't changed for years!?!?!