Thank you for bearing with the often difficult period of migration from the Yahoo! WebRing sytem. At this point in time we have had more that 18,000 complete rings migrate, with significant portions of 20,000 additional rings, and smaller portions of some 6,000 others. One encouraging note is that a large number of users who never made the transition to Yahoo have been found and have happily made the migration away, even after being isolated for more than a year from the rings and sites.

We hope the change has been a positive one, even if a little awkward, for most of you. Some of the additional features we have introdcued since launch should make managing your sites and rings a little bit easier:

• You and recateogorize your ring now. Find this in Global Settings
• You can rename your ring. This is it's own link in ring Management
• You can customize (most) of the emails that go out. We'll try to get links to customize the others available soon. We have recently added Help pages outlining some of the system "tags" you can use in your email forms as well.
• You can customize the SSNB and/or html navigation code your members use.
• You can establish a user "profile". This is very useful for ring managers who would like to provide instructions to potential members in addition to, or in place of, a contact email address.
• You can construct a custom Join preface page to provide greater join instructions to new members.
• Some ring and site stats are available, and more will be coming soon.

New Initiatives

We expect to do more with stats, SSNB management, ring manager homepages and site "promotion", and begin operation of auto-management tools, which have been shutdown during migration, continued enahancements to emails and other notifications, keywords and search, adoption of abandoned rings, and more.

Migration Details

As many of you have noticed, and inquired about, the old webring.org domain names still link to the Yahoo system. This will be true until the migration period is over.

The migration period was scheduled to last 90 days, which would mean that it should end sometime after January 1, 2002. If migration appears complete before then we have the option of stopping earlier, but we would like to give everyone a chance to migrate rather than lose information they would then have to recreate.

Migration is much more important for ring managers than it is for site owners. The reason for this is that ring managers have the ability to "assign" a site to a member. Thus, site owners who fail to migrate will still have the opportunity to do so, with their ring manager's assistance, after the official migration period ends.

In any case, once the migration period ends then ALL links that currently go to Yahoo! WebRing will be redirected to this site. This should ease some of the confusion and bring a measurable increase in traffic as well.

Problem Reports

You can continue to refer to the trouble and "fix" links on the front page of the system. We'll try to keep this up to date as we move ahead.

Help System

The WebRing Team The prior status page can be viewed here.