Rings & Clubs on the web

Webrings and clubs are a big part of internet culture, but they've been recently buried under the pile of LLM generated slop on the internet.

What is a webring?

webring

/ˈwɛb.rɪŋ/

noun · plural webrings

1. (internet, dated) — A group of related websites linked together in a loop, each site pointing to the next and previous one in the ring.

What the hell is a search engine?

Webrings are usually ran by the ringmaster, a person in charge of adding, removing websites from the webring, aslong as reviewing applications from new members into to the webring.

These were the search engine before search engines, letting you discover alot of cool stuff!

Webrings are big

There is usually alot of websites in a webring, which is fine, many webrings include a "random" link, leading to a random site in the ring.

This can be used as a great way to meet loads of new people with the same interests as you, the experience is even better if the webring is smaller, which usually means the community of the interest is smaller, which means you can meet people with the same niches as you!

History of the webring1

Webrings started around 1994 by Denis Howe, under the name EUROPa2 at Imperial College.

this expanded when Giraldo Hierro conceptualized a central CGI script to make it more functional. In may of 1994 the script was developed by Sage Weil.

This gained a bit of traction, in 1995 Weil decided to form a company called WebRing, 2 years later he sold it to Starseed Inc. Which was acquired by Geocities in 1998.

Join a webring, It's worth it.

As said before, its a great way to socialize, meet new people, make friends, etc.

I'm writing this post in light of my recent spree of joining webrings, as seen by my webring page, which alone should tell you a bit about who I am, which is exactly the point!

You are also uncovering how the early internet worked, before big search engine stole the point of a webring.

What about clubs?

A club is basically like a webring, but without every page linking to the other.

Like a real life club, it groups people with specific things in common, or people that fall under a certain category.

one example of this is the 512kb club, a club for people who's websites are under 512kb in size, there are many variations of this such as the 1mb club, 1kb club, etc.

the points about socializing, making friends, etc. from earlier apply to here too!

Summary

Webrings are cool, you should join one, and they have a pretty big history before Google.

Info taken from the wikipedia page for webrings

Expanding Undirectional Ring Of Pages