say goodbye to a glittery webring index.
yes, it's true the index is down.

the index was a great idea, and i really liked doing it! however, the sad
truth is, with anywhere from 1-3 tori webrings being created each DAY, it's a
full time job just keeping up with them. i don't have the time or the desire anymore.

my hope in creating the index was that ewfs would see how many webrings there are,
and think twice before starting one of their own. or better yet,
they would start a tori webring for specific sites (sites with mp3s, sites with desktop
themes, etc..) instead, more and more tori webring clones started popping up.

instead of looking at the many webrings that already exist and trying to do things
differently or better than them, or finding a tori webring that is no longer
maintained and taking it over; ewfs seem to think that all you need to make a webring
is a tori lyric for the name and a crappy graphic.

not knocking the webrings. i'm a member of many, i maintain two, and i love some of them.
i still say that we have too many, we don't need so many generic webrings
that are just for tori sites. SPECIFIC webrings are where it's at people!!

so, because i barely have enough time to maintain my tori site and my personal site,
the webring index lies in the graveyard of tori sites no longer existing.

it's been fun people, if you're thinking about starting a tori webring, i'd urge you
to consider these facts:

a. there are 123 rings devoted to tori alone.

b. only 3 of these rings are devoted to specific tori-related things (one is devoted to biographies/reference
materials, 2 are for bootlegs, one is for pictures or art.)

although there are several rings for small tori sites, or just tori fans i don't
count them because again, they include a mish-mash of sites.

c. of the 123 above mentioned webrings:
33 of them have less than 10 members
many of them have 0 or only 1 member

about half of the other 110 or so rings have less than 20 members!

d. many of them have some kind of flaw in the HTML that keeps sites from being submitted to the ring.

e. many of the webmasters don't know enough about html to make anything other than
generic graphics and HTML.

so i beg you, before you decide to become one of hundreds of crappy tori rings
make sure you have the knowlege necesary to create and maintain the ring,
the time to keep the ring up, and the devotion to try to recruit sites.

and please, please, please, make your webring be about some specific tori thing,
or you'll just become another tori ring in a sea of identical, generic, crappy tori rings.