webri.ng

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.

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.

The owners of webri.ng hold strong views about the internet being a place where people from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and political beliefs can safely, and confidently 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. We 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 create 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 created as 'private'.

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

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

This is a good question! The thought did occur to me to create software that users could use to self-host their own webring instance. This would totally be in alignment with this website's aims of supporting the 'small web'.

In the end I decided to proceed with creating 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 someone wished to fork this site's software, or use it to create their own webring software, that is totally fine! Provided they give proper credit of course.