[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.