Introduction
The heyday of webrings lasted from around 1996 until 2017. Some of the webring systems such as WebRing were database driven and as such were able to provide a lot of both generic and specific statistics for their users.
General Statistics
WebRing reported that in September 2005, it had:
4.7 million unique visitors
21 million hits
46,800 Rings
1,004,000 active Sites
565,000+ registered active members
9,600+ contributing members
The number of webrings seems to have been falling because in October 2002, there were 61,622 webrings with over 60 being added per day. WebRing reported that it was receiving over half a million hit per day on its CGI (Common Gateway Interface) folder, meaning that's how many people were clicking on one of the webring links.
The fields available are: Date, CGI hits, Page Views, Ratio, New Rings, Total Rings, Active Rings, Active today, Total Sites, Active Sites, Active today, Suspended, and Pending. The CGI program also calculated the average and totals of these statistics.
Webring Statistics
Each webring in the WebRing system had its own main page. This had the name of the webring, and description of it. It had a list of the sites in the ring and a description of each of those.
Besides the above, the webring main page carried some statistics relating to the webring:
Date Created
Number of active sites
Pending Sites - those sites waiting to be added to the webring
Today's page views
Total page views
A link called Details that led to more statistics about the webring
The details link led to pages that gave another list of links and information:
Uniquness rating
Navigation rating
Ring Page Views
Sites Delivering
Sites Receiving
Similar Rings
Uniqueness Rating
The uniqueness rating of each webring was a number from 0 to 100, with 100 being the best possible rating, and was intended to give visotrs some idea of how "unique" the sites in the webring were. It was not a measure of the quality of the site comprising the Ring, just how often they appear in other webrings.
The score was based on a simple measure: The number of other webrings each site in this partocular webring belongs to. If, on average, each site also belongs to many other webrings then this particular webring is not considered very unique. If you have visited several other webrings on the same topic you may well have already visited many of the sites in this particular webring.
A high score indicates that the sites in this particular webring were not likely to be found in other webrings, even within the same topic area. A score above 75 indicated a webring with high uniqueness (you aren't likely to find these sites elsewhere in the WebRing system), 50 indicates good uniqueness but you can find some of the sites in other webrings, and a value under 30 not exceptionally unique as you're likely to find many sites in other webrings.
Navigation Rating
The navigation rating of each ring was intended to give the visitor some idea of how easy it is to navigate the webring when visiting the sites. The value could range from 0 to 100, with 100 being the best possible rating.
The score is based on two measures: The percentage of active sites that have working navigation code as determined by the WebRing web site checker and the percentage of sites that have the navigation code placed on the registered URL for the web site. Some web sites place the navigation code on a separate links page, thus making it a little harder for users to find the navigation code.
For a ring to earn a 100 rating all sites must have had valid navigation code on the registered URL. This is sometimes not entirely feasible, and the WebRing web site checker is at other times confused by third party ISP systems and highly elaborate page generation schemes. Thus, a rating of 90 or higher is considered a well maintained ring. Values lower than 90 indicated the ring may be more difficult to navigate. Very low values (under 75) suggested poorly managed rings.
Ring Page Views
This was a date range choosable list of the Total Hits, Page Views, and how many clicked on the List, Next, Prev, and Random links of the webring widget per day.
Sites Delivering & Sites Receiving
The WebRing system must have kept a database table of the date, which site and it's ID that a webring link was clicked on, how many times it was clicked on over the course of a day, and which site and its ID that the clicked link went to along with the receving site's count for the day.
Both the Sites Delivering and Sites Receiving show the same sort of information, a sorted list of sites that shows the results to and from a site over the last 8 weeks, and the last two weeks. The Sites Delivering page shows the sites that the link was clicked on sorted by the 8-week "from" value. The Sites Receiving shows the same sort of informtion except it shows the sites the clicked link went to sorted by the 8-week "to" value.
Similar Rings
I am not sure how WebRing calculated the list of Similar Rings. It may have parsed the webring description, picked out keywords and chose webrings with similar keywords.
Notes
I am not sure how Webring organized this information but it would have been easier to use several database tables for each webring in a relational database rather than a single large table.
This is probably why the early webring systems were written in PHP, Perl or some other language that can easily communicate with server-side relational databases. Nowadays, several JavAsCript frameworks such as Node.js can do this as well.