It's really nothing more than another zany Starship passing by my Universe. Borgs and any other creatures out there will happily join, but I'm a human, and I use mechanization to my own ends, as I see fit. If I don't want it, I can say "no" to any form of technology. That's the characteristic which makes me human. And that choosing is alive and well in me.
"....Yahoo! reminds me of the Vogons and their new creation reminds me of hyperspace bypasses ...." Richard Lowe.

reviewing the damage, the fury, the uselessness and the recovery of a Disastrous take-over

Thank you. I feel better now.. 
 

If only for that, it has been worthwhile. At least it has for me.

Since Black Tuesday a lot has changed, for most of the members of this group and myself certainly, as well as for all ringmasters and ringmembers [in Webring] everywhere.

Personally, the change pushed me to change hosts from one that was not working well (down several times a month and often slow) to one that supports CGI and also is extremely fast and to date has not been down once. I am dramatically changing parts of my website now that I have access to new tools like CGI, PHP, ASP, Htaccess and so on. I've moved all of my rings (except one left on Ringsurf) to Ringlink and have tried out and reviewed as many of the other ring systems as I have had time for. I am in the process of setting up a new ringlink system for my wife's rings and have adopted and moved several abandoned rings.

The Ring community has grown by leaps and bounds and has become, in my opinion, stronger and healthier since the day of destruction. I've read every post since that day, written dozens of articles and had extremely interesting discussions with dozens of wonderful people, all as a result of a very destructive act!

I've seen the WebRingNews club, which was an incredibly useful and communicative group turn into an Orwellian hell, with postings and id's deleted by some arbitrary idiots who changed the rules in mid-stream because they didn't particularly like what people had to say. Others have defended the people performing these deletions for various reasons - but I cannot do so. Wrong is wrong, bad is bad and evil is evil. It must be recognized, acknowledged and, ultimately, not tolerated or the deeds will spread and continue until everything is the same shade of grey.

I am sad to see a system utterly destroyed in a single day, a system which enabled wonderful communities to be created on the web by many kind and caring people. A new Ring system has arisen from the ashes, a system which, to put it bluntly and frankly, sucks.
The new Web Ring is inherently flawed and will never again be as glorious and wonderful as it was just a couple of short months ago. Oh, I am sure it will make Yahoo! plenty of money, but it is, by design, hostile, sterile and barren. The people who modified Web Ring should be ashamed of the destruction they have done, and of the pale, useless, idiotic shell of a system that they have put in it's place.

Of course, we should have (and many did) see it coming. After all, this is the company that destroyed GeoCities. I have many fond memories of that place which is now just a thin, pale version of it's former awesome glory.

Yahoo is the company which is notorious for not giving a hoot about people who submit sites to their directory ... after all, they do not make any money from those submissions. It is a crying shame that their directory has become so popular, as it is actually incredibly lame compared to others such as DMOZ. At least in DMOZ you can submit your site and have it reviewed and added within a reasonable amount of time. At least with DMOZ you can understand the submission criteria, and if you want, you can even join and become a "guide" yourself. What better way to be part of something than to be able to join it and give back something to the web community!

Personally, I am removing Yahoo! from my life. I have moved my rings (except for a "stub" of each, to be deleted Jan 1, 2001) and I am moving my sites from all rings which have decided to stay with Yahoo. I will not be part of this grand money-making scheme called Yahoo! any more.

Oh yes, what does 42 have to do with anything? Read Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and perhaps you will understand. Yahoo! reminds me of the Vogons and their new creation reminds me of hyperspace bypasses ... why do people need bypasses? Because they've got to have them...
 

I stuck it out for nearly 3 months but at the same time had a look at other systems available. There are so many good systems out there - I'm using MIMAnet now  - not only are they personal and friendly but they will never be taken over by Yahoo.
 

There is a great difference between Y!WR having a large number of Rings, and having a large number of fully functioning and active rings. Consider what will happen if Y! ever decides to use the WR numbers to try to convince investors or advertisers that they have a thriving community here.
If I were looking to invest or advertise here, I would take a little time to see exactly how successful the whole thing is. The more skeletons there are pointing elsewhere, the more likely people are to see exactly how unsuccessful this system is. I really like James' concept of a protest ring in every category.

There is nothing preventing us from contacting the companies which advertise at Yahoo! and especially Y!WR, to let them know exactly what has happened here, and why their advertising dollars might be better spent elsewhere.
 

Perhaps I'm too cynical (I'm often accused of being so), but it appears to me that Yahoo! isn't following at least some of these necessary steps in reworking the webring system. They are certainly not taking input (this is a really important took in portal development!), and their programmers really don't appear to have any idea what they're doing, plus the beta testing was apparently inadequate or poorly conducted (possibly under very controlled circumstances which didn't account for a lot of variables; my guess is that this is the case). 

Speaking as a professional web developer who is married to yet another professional web developer (who is a leading programmer on a very big and complex portal project), it looks to me like Yahoo! once again lives up to its name.

In other words, they sure look like a bunch of yahoos to me. 

It was a very small, specialty ring that got a reasonable amount of traffic for a Ring of that size and limited interest, and I've just deleted it from the Y!WR system. I know James recommends leaving a "ghost" ring and I may do that with one of my other two rings, but for this ring, I just wanted to delete it entirely, plus the existing ring fragments out there for the old ring have a link DIRECTLY to the ring's homepage, so anyone who stumbles across the ring and is interested can still join the new ring. 

The ring is currently half the size it was before the move to RingSurf, but I pretty much expected that some people wouldn't be cooperative about making changes (I know people and human nature pretty well). 

And now I feel... You know, it feels a lot like a divorce. I'm sort of relieved that it's over, but sad that it ended badly and that the relationship broke down. Odd, isn't it? 

I wonder what the yahoos would think of someone confessing that their takeover of a system feels like a divorce? Bah. They'd probably just snicker and think I'm too emotional for a mere demographic and marketing target (after all, that's all I am to them).
 

But they are counting on the malcontents leaving and newbies joining who don't know better. And, sometimes, they tossed the "old" rings a bone, like being able to "keep" the HTML code (even though there is no way to effectively update the "home" function and it is difficult to obtain "site ID" and difficult to let new members know). Why do I suspect that the "old ring" exemption is truly an "old ring" exemption? Because the newbies won't know better.

Eventually the old guard will leave. I can even see Yahoo! touting its version of the ring concept as "better" (easier to manage, no need to create complex HTML code, less of a time commitment).

In fact, that is perhaps my biggest gripe: that they don't have the integrity to be honest with us about their true intentions.