What's a WebRing?

A ring is a collection of sites that share a common topic. For example, there are several dog rings. Some of them allow any site that has anything to do with dogs. Others only allow sites that are all about dogs, or maybe only non-commercial sites. Several are breed-specific, and only allow sites about that breed.

Each site in a ring has a NavBar – a piece of webpage code common to every site in the ring. The NavBar has 3 important links: previous, next, and hub. The next link exemplifies the ring-y nature of the rings. Following the link takes you to the next site in the ring. If you keep clicking it, you'll eventually end up back where you started, having seen every site in the ring. The previous link, unsurprisingly, works in the opposite direction.

The hub link takes you to the ring's hub page. This page has a description of the ring, and provides more comprehensive access to the ring – you can apply to join the ring, contact the user who manages the ring, see a list of all the sites in the ring, and so on.

The manager of a ring is, for the most part, an autocrat within the ring. They decide which applicants may join the ring, the order of the sites, and much more. A good manager keeps the quality of the content available in a webring as high as possible.