Homepage What is a WebRing?
How did Yahoo ruin it?

Participating web sites had banded together to form their sites into linked circles rather Rings thus enabling more visitors to reach them quickly and easily.  Through navigation links found most often at the bottom of Member pages, Visitors can travel all or any of the sites in a Ring. They can move through a Ring in either direction, go to the next or previous site, or list the next five sites in the Ring

The WebRing system could support a nearly unlimited number of separate and distinct Rings across the Internet. This unique structure allows the creation and evolution of tens of thousands of different "web communities." Each Ring was started and maintained by an individual website owner, it's RingMaster. 

A Brief History

WebRing was first created in June, 1995, by Sage Weil, launched in March, 1996, and moved onto its own server in September, 1996.  It was the first, largest, and fastest-growing service of its kind on the Internet.

WebRing drew its initial inspiration from a similar structure called EUROPa (Expanding Unidirectional Ring of Pages). Michael at newdream.net helped with initial graphic design. In August, 1995 Jerry Hierro suggested a centralized CGI program to run the system.

The first new Ring created was the ESLoop.  By the beginning of 1997, there were over 1,000 Rings on the system, and by May of that year 10,000. By April, 1998, there were over 40,000 Rings on WebRing.  The WebRing was experiencing a growth rate of over 10% monthly.  Daily page requests exceed 2,000,000; Member sites total over 1,300,000; Rings total over 80,000.

On Wednesday morning, January 27, 1999, Yahoo! has acquired GeoCities and its affiliated firms.  It took about a few months for Yahoo! to ruin everything that was good at Geocities and an additional year it took to them smash out the fine WebRing network that had been built by years of labor by numerous volunteers.

Then WebRing promised that it would "be better than ever.  Much better than ever!" However, too many RingMasters realized it was rather a disaster.  The merger was NOT "a perfect match" as Yahoo! and The WebRing had claimed.  Lastly (in October 2001), Yahoo! lastly gave up and silently stopped hindering WebRing which became again a system with better and reliable features.