Introduction
I completely rewrote my original History of Webrings page in July 2021, a couple of months later in October, Ash posted to my Guestbook that perhaps I was wrong and that webrings are making a comeback mostly due to the interest in creating personal websites created by Neocities.
The original webring systems privided a list so you could choose to join an existing webring or create your own and these were usually confined to single subjects, some of which were very loosely defined. The new webrings have a different view in that most of the webrings I looked at are not confined to a particular subject, so you jump from site to site not quite knowing what you are going to get.
The List
I did a search for these new-style webrings and have so far found the following. Most are for non-commerical, personal sites which is what webrings were originally made for. As the big webring systems have gone, it's just as easy to list the individual rings. I make no promises about this directory, just that when I visited them they were working.
The list has been compiled with a lot of help from the owner of foreverliketh.is, the MelonLand Forum community, and the ring masters kind enough to email me..
Recently added webrings:
Breakcore, Coolstation Coolring, Ranfren, SquareGate, and Tropical Rice Bowl
This list is created from a Google Sheet using the Google Charts API to display it. I know from previous experience of doing this it is certainly faster and easier for me to update and maintain. For example, the links only have to be made once.
There are some pages around that are entitled "Webrings" but are simply a list of sites or offer reciprocal links. I have not listed these as they do not appear to me as true webrings. In October 2023, I changed my definition of what a webring is again. At a minimum, the sites that belong to one must include must include previous and next site navigation links, and not just a link or icon leading back to a site listing page.
I find it disappointing that when I checked the webrings in October 2023, only 1/5 (20%) of them could be navigated properly using just the next button on the pages. There were only a couple of reasons that the navigation failed: the website had completely disappeared or I couldn't find the webring code on any of the pages. A couple of sites made it very difficult to follow the links because they opened the next site in the ring in a tiny iframe that made it hard if not impossible to view it properly.
If you know of a webring not listed here, please email me at and I will add it.
Missing, Unresponsive, and Defunct Webrings
Unfortunately even since beginning to find and list the new style webrings in December 2022, there are rings that have disappeared, no longer function or are not accepting new members. There could be any number of reasons for this including boredom with running them, technical issues and time.
Of the rings that I applied to join but never got a reply, it could be that I have been ghosted, that is they looked at the site but rather than telling me that it has been rejected didn't reply at all. Rather than lose the information, and because the rings may reappear at some later date, I have listed them here.
The list of all the webrings this site belongs to can be found here.
Other Webring Lists
Here are some other webring directories you might like to visit:
Ringlink and Anvilfire
Ringlink (Internet Archive) was written in Perl by Gunnar Hjalmarsson in 2000. The final version (Internet Archive), v3.3 was made available in 2009, shortly after which the site closed down. Gunnar published it under the GNU General Public License. Several webring systems appear to have used Ringlink to manage the webrings. Gunnar published the code to SourceForge and it is still there in January 2023. It is also available here. Download (ZIP, 324Kb)
Some ring masters also decided to use Gunnar's code and host it themselves. One such was the author of Anvilfire, a blacksmithing and metalworking resource. They ran five webrings using Webring run by Yahoo!. In 2000, they became disillusioned with Yahoo! and started using Gunnar's Ringlink. Their webring page is still up (July 2023) but seems to have been inactive since 2008.
Anvilfire's webrings were:
Ancient Trades Webring (15 members)
Architectural Metals Webring (Created but no members)
Blacksmith's Webring (188 members)
Country Life & Heritage Webring (5 members)
Steelworkers Webring (43 members)
Some Explanations
These notes were mostly written to help me understand some of what is happening on today's internet and what it is being used for. I'm old!
Alterhuman
Some rings are for people who identify as alterhuman or otherkin, someone who believe themselves not quite, more than, or different to the rest of us. There's are various sub-cultures connected with being alterhuman, they may identify with creatures from fiction or mythology or believe they have some sort of power or insight not accessible to anyone else.
Fediverse
A rejection, at least in part, of the masssive commercial internet companies that has evolved into a network of interconnected servers which communicate with each other based on decentralized networking protocols. The servers run individual instances of software for almost every use and service such as social media, file sharing of all sorts, blogging, hosting websites and so on.
If you have a presence on the internet you rely on big companies and some very clever people to provide the infrastructure, technology, hardware, services and software to enable us to do what we do, but what I find most strange about some of what the Fediverse does, is that they are not truely self-hosted as my sites are, "The Server in the Cellar" but are hosted or rely on gigantic server farms such as AWS and Cloudflare. This can be seen in various forums such as r/selfhosted on Reddit where the standard reply to most posts is something to do with Cloudflare, Docker, containers, some sort of VPN, or proxies.
Furries
You may have seen some webrings refering to furry or furries. They are mostly art sites about anthropomorphized animals, such as Sonic the Hedgehog or the Pokémon characters. It may be some authors may well identify more deeply than othes with the characters, a type of alterhuman or otherkin.
All sorts of rubbish has been written and said about them. Some say that furries are fetishists with an interest in sex in animal costumes. Others that they live their lives as part animals such as the idiotic litter boxes in school bathrooms trope that you see here and there.
Old Web
A nostalgia for simpler, smaller, personal, sites that were around when I first started mine in the mid-1990s to around the mid-2000s. Some sites have even brought back the old aesthetics of being bright and sparkly with every animated or site button GIF they can find. Another design feature being brought back by some is where the background and foreground colors are so similar the text has to be highlighted to read it.
Chuunibyou
Some of the above may be described as Chuunibyou, a Japanese word roughly meaning "middle school 2nd year syndrome", more generically "middle-schooler disease" and even more generically, a symptom of teenage angst. If older, it could be some sort of mid-life crisis or simply a hankering for the "good old days." My own feeling towards them is whatever floats your boat, so long as you're not hurting yourself or anyone else, it's all part of life's rich tapestry. What a world we live in!