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What Webring Wonder?
Imagine the awe a ten year old may evoke when one can claim to their friends: "I have a Sailormoon website!" Perhaps this incentive has served to become one of the major causes in the sudden exponential growth in Sailormoon-oriented websites on the web. And, granted, some of these sites have great potential to become dependable resources for all things Sailormoon. However, others leave a lot to be desired, and the situation doesn't improve much when the webmasters attempt to bring traffic to, what I regretfully have to call, a sorry excuse for a website. For now, the trend seems to be to apply to one webring after another, as if applying for fifty different webrings will magically bring thousands of visitors to a site which takes five minutes to load on a cable connection. Yeah, hard to believe, but true. I would know because I use to manage a webring (and still do... don't ask. ^-^;;). And I used to have to put aside about a half hour of my time to surf through twenty sites. On a cable connection.
When I was ringmistress of my old ring, hardly a day went by that I didn't receive an application to join my webring. At first, I diligently went through every site, approving or rejecting each application. However, I soon lost my ardour, as gradually, I realized that being a webmistress meant sifting through applications to which a quarter weren't even valid to begin with (ie. invalid URLs, e-mail addresses, and so forth). The other one quarter consisted of sites in which the webmasters hadn't followed the instructions for inserting the ring HTML fragment onto their site. In the end, only about half of the applicants got accepted into the ring, and ultimately, I wasted an hour of my life looking through the sites.
Eventually, the circumstances declined so much so that I was almost afraid to surf the Web for Sailormoon sites. Why? Simply because some queued sites (ie. sites waiting to be added to the ring) were so bad, so horrendously designed, so filled with trash and animated gifs and huge images and javascripts, that more often than not, my browser crashed and my ancient computer froze. It then took another five minutes to reboot the computer and run scandisk. Furthermore, when I very justly rejected these sites from the ring, the webmasters had the gall to e-mail me and demand to know why they weren't allowed into the ring. Gee, I wonder... As if I'd be able to check the validity of the ring HTML fragment on their site if my browser constantly crashed upon merely approaching their site.
So to all who believe in the wonder of applying to a webring and thereby gettng thousands of hits, all I have to say is this: Ha! What webring 'wonder?' Definitely doesn't exist for this happily reformed ringmistress, thank you very much. And to the many others preparing to apply for acceptance into a webring: Read the guidelines before filling out the form. It'll save you from a headache when you get an e-mail informing you that your site had been rejected. And the ringmaster just might thank you for saving him a few extra minutes of the day.
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