webri.ng

FAQ

What is this site?

Webri.ng is a platform where people can host webrings without the need to manage their own infrastructure.

This platform was created as a tribute to the internet's early days, which we believe was a cultural renaissance, where an emergent culture of creativity blossomed.

We hope that this platform empowers people to be creative, and recapture the feelings of creative freedom, and freedom of expression that defined the internet of yesterday.

Can I customise my webring?

The idea behind this service is to provide the functionality a user would need to run their own webring. Webri.ng doesn't intend to offer a fully-featured hosting service. The ideal use case is the owner of a webring sharing the links provided to allow users to navigate their webring.

This can be used in a variety of ways, such as embedding the links in a 'badge' format that the members of a webring can place on their pages. Or perhaps embedding the links in images. In many cases, only using the 'random' link will suffice.

Users are always free to set up DNS records so that they can embed the links to their webring into their site. Such as redirecting their own URLs to the 'next', 'previous', and 'random' links associated with their site. These URLs are permanent, and do not change.

If you need assistance with using your webring, feel free to reach out.

What kind of content is allowed on this service?

The owners of webri.ng strongly believe that the internet should be a place where people from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and political beliefs can freely and safely express themselves.

So far we have not had to specify any concrete rules about what kind of content people are allowed to link to on this service, and we would like to keep it that way. Having said this, we reserve the right to remove any content that we think is offensive to the general public, or brings the service into disrepute.

While we acknowledge that the decentralised nature of the internet does create a 'grey area' with regards to the specific legality of content, this site is hosted in the United States of America, and as such, we are bound to comply with US law. The owners of this service are also bound to comply with the laws of the countries we reside in.

We do not specifically prohibit content of a sexual nature, provided that this content would be legal in the United States. However, if you do wish to run webrings with links to sexual content, we kindly request that you set these webrings to 'private', so they do not appear in the main index.

We do not want to prohibit political content, however due to its potentially divisive nature we kindly request that webrings dedicated to political issues are set as 'private'.

If you have any questions about our content policies, please get in touch.

Is the source code to this service available?

Yes it is! The source code for this site can be viewed here.

Why not provide users software for self-hosting?

That's a good question! I did considering creating software for users to self-host their own webring instance. This is totally in alignment with this website's aims of supporting the 'small web'.

In the end I decided to create the service you see here today. If for no other reason than to take advantage of the great URL! As a compromise, the source code for this site is fully available. If you want to fork this site's software, and use it to create your own webring software, that's totally fine! Provided you give proper credit of course.

A user of this service has added my site to their webring, and I'd like it removed.

If you'd your site removed from a webring, the first thing to do is to contact its owner. If you don't know how to contact the owner, check to see if their contact details are included in their webring's profile on our platform. If you can't contact the webring's owner, or the webring owner is uncooperative, please get in touch with us, and we'll look into it.

What's up with the layout? Why's the design so basic?

The design of this site is a tribute to the golden age of web design, heavily inspired by classic web 2.0 websites like DeviantArt, and esreality. The design is intended to remind users of the internet's early days, when websites were much more personal, and webrings were more common. A consequence of this minimal design is that the website is lightweight, and loads quickly on most devices.

If you have any suggestions for how we can improve the design, please get in touch! You're also always welcome to directly suggest any changes in code, by raising a pull request on our Github page!