Why a "Webring" page? Why revive the dead?
During the start of the internet (approximately the early 90s or so) search engines weren't what you call as big and overreaching as they are nowadays. When you searched for something on the internet search engines of old often would only care about the baseline result of an absolute match. Not necessarily the subject of the context of the search. For example, if you searched for an artist's name. You may get that artist who does something you like, but you may also get random people who are similarly named to the artist you were looking for.
Groups of people would get together and form communities of web pages that link among each other sharing a common theme or goal. These goals are ultimately what led to the start of "Webrings."
To us, FurNation for the furry fandom was -kinda- like Neocities for the furry fandom in the 1990s which also hosted a Webring service for anyone on their network as well as off of their network to be linked together within the furry community called the "FurRing". Understand that having a web page in the early Internet days was expensive as fuck! It did have some rules to get in. The only way you got onto FurNation was you had to know the guy, or you did work for the guy (had a magazine of the same name people got published in. They also had SecondLife SIM activity as well but that's a different story entirely!)
A little bit of side-note on the image:
Danm, just them giving you full permission and explaining how to save their company image on your hard drive just seems so fucking wholesome versus the crypto-bro/NFT hell of today!
Update 12/18/2023
There's another administration team that is attempting to restore the Fur-Ring called "Furnation Reborn (external)" which is a part of the Furry Restoration Group (external). This is one of those rare occurrences where things sometimes do not stay dead on the net.
The picture above is an example of a WebRing from a fan base we were close with. This is what it looked like. Depending on the WebRing that you were with you had to post this HTML code on the front of your website to promote and maintain your listing within the WebRing. This can be problematic because your adding HTML code referencing to another site as well as demanding the web administration to practically inject advertisement onto their index.html is a threat to security as well as general web performance.
Meaning of linkage.
One of the biggest issues of a web admin linking to a webring like the above is links must have "Meaning." What is the significant importance for us to link to all of these sites?
The importance is best illustrated above. We used Stimulus in this example but honestly, ALL social networks apply the same logic. They limited your ability to customize your page. If lucky they'll let you change color and maybe just maybe update the title screen with your background art. On top of this, the UI is laid out where it insists that you post first before you even bother to read anyone's replies. Talk first. Read the content (Or anyone's replies) much later. With little to no barrier.
In the classical sense, this notion is rejected by webrings. We want full control of our websites, our content, and our UI.
Although our views may vary greatly. Each button you click on a neighboring webring will take you to a unique site. Not some cookie-cutter bullshit page. Of course, the level of content will vary greatly from site to site.
The first death of the Webring.
A lot of factors came into being that resulted in WebRing's death. Search Engine technology got better. Social network art services like DeviantArt, and FurAffinity guaranteed instantaneous response versus waiting for months for someone to comment like what can happen on a Website. In general, social networks amplify this by having contact with everyone interested in your creative works in almost real-time. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! Despite our past behaviors of shouting our manifesto to take back your data. We understand that hosting a website isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Web admins have had their incarnation of linkage. In our case, it's the "Cellar Door". In which the cellar door was a simple list of links of individuals we knew or were inspired by. Some of the people on that page may or may not know that we were inspired by some of them. So to that end, it still deserves its page.
It should be noted that later on we split the webrings into its page respectfully called "Webrings" as the updates were far more dynamic the cellar door and didn't want people getting on scroll crazy about it.
One of the hardest pills to swallow with many webrings is a lot of admins do not want to link to someone else's JavaScript code. This also contributed to overall webring death because it was not adaptable to web-admins security standards.
Present day... Present TIME!!!
Search for something and be hit with Ads leading you to download malware on your PC. Thanks, Google!
Now, we suffer from a different problem. Which servers and services are so big that it's virtually impossible for a search engine to find your site unless you cover a very popular topic that a lot of people are interested in. There is also net-based censorship; Either via the proxy of a large tech firm or governmental entities. There's also searching for something and getting completely derailed or infected from a site that paid for Google Ads. Finally, Search results are magically being dropped off of engines because a website that only pulls in a few hundred people a day does not matter. Or, the website that only pulls in a hundred people is not advertiser-friendly.
This is why people are starting to give up on search engines and instead rebooting the community systems of bookmarking, blog-rolls, and Webrings of old.
Update 09/17/2022 - Lainchan Submission time.
Right on. With some major arm twisting in a mud pit screaming at me to "Shut up and stop acting like a bitch!" recommendations in our contact us area. We posted our website to be added to the webring on Lainchan. And well....... That's it!
There isn't any administrative approval mechanism in place to give a thumbs up or down if you have been accepted. You do it and it's up to the website admins of each site to add you.
Unfortunately, we're coming a little late to the party and thus only websites that regularly update their webrings or websites that are fairly new will add us to their site. Or websites that don't want to add us at all which is kind of the beauty of this Web Ring! It doesn't force you to accept everyone. Because we'll admit it! There were two websites within the Lainchan webring we just didn't add because to be blunt there was nothing redeemable on those two sites. Lainchan is an anonymous board so naturally, you will have people who will write up some HTML on Neocities just to throw middle fingers at everyone. In which we golf-clap and move on.
Technical and dimensional standards.
Many threads ago someone answered the question of
Why 240x60 for banner resolution?
Of course, the problem with forums is eventually a thread is destroyed. So! We saved that little bit of information.
Not going to use quotes because the font used is obnoxious for paragraph format. But will still put everything in quotation.
"In present day, common screen resolution is 1920x1080, at max with 240x60 you could fit:
# Vertical
(1080 // 60) == 18
# Horizonal
(1920 // 240) == 8
which is only 1 off in each dimension compared to 88x31. Furthermore, while 88x31 banners can fit a 800x600 resolution, 240x60 can fit a 1920x1080 resolution:
# Cant fit 800x600 viewport with 88x31 banners
(600 // 31) != (600 / 31)
(800 // 88) != (800 // 88)
# but 240x60 banners fit the entire viewport for 1920x1080 resolution
(1080 // 60) == (1080 / 60)
(1920 // 240) == (1920 / 240)
Since the max # of 240x60 banners on 1920x1080 is even in both dimensions (8 and 18 are both even), you can half the resolution and still fill the entire viewport (4x9 banners on a 960x540 resolution) while retaining the same aspect ratio (16:9). You can also divide both dimensions of 240x60 by 2 evenly twice (240 / 4 == 60; 60 / 4 == 15), meaning you can reduce the size of the banners to 1/4th and 1/16th the size while retaining the same aspect ratio and being able to fill an entire 1920x1080 viewport (with 60x15 banners, you could fit a massive 2304 banners on a single 1920x1080 viewport). In the same line of thinking, mobile has a smaller viewport and less uniform viewport, being able to shrink banners down by 1/4th and 1/16th the size without distorting the aspect ratio makes it easy to accommodate mobile and other smaller viewports.
176x62 would have been backward compatible with 88x31 and fit better on present-day common screen resolutions, but the maximum number of banners in each dimension would be off by a larger factor and would not be divisible. 160x60 was also an option, is closer to being backward compatible, and can fill a 1920x1080 viewport, but the dimensions of the max number of banners on 1920x1080 would be further away from 9x19.
It wasn't random, some thought went into the 240x60" - Anonymous poster.
Image mods.
Any animated GIFs that were outside of the 240x60 parameters were resized with FFmpeg before upload:
ffmpeg -hide_banner -v warning -i source.gif -filter_complex "[0:v] scale=240:60:flags=lanczos,split [a][b]; [a] palettegen=reserve_transparent=on:transparency_color=ffffff [p]; [b][p] paletteuse" destination-webring.gif
Additional variants are converted using our internal server script.
Would you like to stick S-Config into your Cellar Door?
That sounded pretty creepy. But that's okay. We like it that way!
Self-shilling - Advertisement MeatSpace.
Where's YOUR link S?!? - Anonymous
"Link" never existed. There was only Zelda. She used Link as an alter ego to justify her horrible actions all across Hyrule while maintaining her supposed royal purity. Being Kidnapped by Gannon is just a psychological metaphor for locking away one's consciousness so Zelda does not have to face the horrors of her actions head-on. Total Fight Club complex.
OH! That "link". Sweet Jimminy fucking Christmas were we off!
Download our banner advertisements.
That being said if you STILL want to add me to your website here are my formatted banners. Because of the aggressive nature of this website, we've 7-zipped the logos for you. You can download it here, or click on the download image within this paragraph.
Animated goodness @ 240x60 size variable but the gif is 3MB in space. Might be a bit of a heavy-boi for some admins.
Static 7KB 240x60 banner for those not feeling like eating 3MB on the animated one.
Need a smol-boy? 88x31 button is available as well!
In closing.
Thank you to those who have inspired us. And thank you to those who placed our badges on your website. It is most appreciated especially in this new era of information war. Take care out there and until next time.
Server protect you.
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