Webrings?

The other day I decided to check out the original Webring.org site as a means of possible promotion for a few new web sites I had put together. Webrings have been around since the near-early days of the net. Strangely enough, the webring functions at Webring.org don't seem to have changed much...

The site is buggy as hell, an eyesore to look at, and their code doesn't validate. Webring navbars show up on your page before your site has even been approved (free promotion for the webring owner, I suppose), and every so often the Webring.org page itself would load itself into my website, Google adsense ads included. On top of that, even if your site has "passed" their initial testing, it will randomly fail at a later time, causing you to be "locked out" from joining any new webrings, or creating any of them. What's worse is that one part of their site will say that you have a failing site, but your list of sites will all indicate that they have passed. What a joke.

Here's the icing on the cake - Webring.org has just announced that they plan on changing the site to a paid site next year. If you don't subscribe to one of their "membership" tiers by then, you only get your site into 5 webrings for free. Now, I see no problem trying to implement a paid membership function for a webring site, but at least fix the inherent problems first. For a site that has been around forever, the non-validating code is a no-brainer to fix. The rest of the problems are sporadic, but I would think that a bit of examination might help to reveal their source.

As for the design of their site, a simple template would work well, but at least make it easy to navigate. Right now, you can't figure out one page from another, and it's a chore to navigate to the page you want to get to.

I'm going to have to check out some other webring sites. There has to be a better option than webring.org, even if it was the oldest and original webring site on the net.