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Page: Profile: Notice
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Notice Specs
Acct. ID: 367753
Notice ID: 16192
Category: Action
Posted: December 28th., 2008
This Notice has been viewed 3442 times |
Webring.com users beware
Proclaimed by: Sentry
Proclaimed from: Chicago, Illinois
Proclamation...
There is a company called Webring (http://www.webring.com) that a lot of Pagan sites depend on for their visibility and traffic. A problem has recently arisen on that site that some of those webmasters might want to know about, because it is going to affect them.
The following message recently went out to the members of a large number of rings which had been taken over by a self-described "Conservative Christian" who, not being in an "I'm OK, you're OK" kind of place, decided to lay down some added rules for any member of her rings who didn't want to have their memberships deleted. This one was interesting:
"4. Website must not be linked to websites promoting witchcraft, sorcery, gay rights, animal rights (extreme groups like PETA) , Edgar Cayce or other questionable cure websites, or other websites deemed offensive by the ring manager."
Not only is she going to delete any sites that include pages talking about Wicca or supportive of Gay Rights, but she'll toss out any sites that link to any such sites. "If we can't beat them philosophically, we can always get their links cut so nobody will know about their sites" seems to be the theory.
"Same old, same old", somebody is probably going to say. Shades of the boycotts of days of old, when members of the Moral Majority would threaten to withhold their business if works of literature they didn't care for weren't censored. This has been a popular game for that set, for years, so what's different?
What's different is that we have a company which is very close to being a monopoly in its market, which has restructured itself in a way that makes efforts like this ring manager's far likelier to succeed, if pursued aggressively. Webring, over the last two years, has placed a lot of rings up for adoption, taking the "for any reason or no reason at all" part of its TOS very seriously. In many cases, former ringmasters never saw what hit them. Ending up with a huge pool of unmanaged rings as they did, in the last month they've started auctioning those rings.
One doesn't bid money for the rings that one is interested in, one bids "activity points", which are earned by spending time on their site. One way of earning activity points is by posting judgmental remarks ("reviews") on the preview window pages for the sites belonging to other members. This is how the incoming ringmaster, who I leave unnamed here out of respect for the TOS, gained many of her points. The results are perverse. The very willingness to spend one's time harassing other users whose beliefs do not jibe with one's own, gives one leverage when one asks for the power to manage the rings they're on, and toss them off those rings, costing their sites - yes - visibility and traffic.
It is a system skewed to favor those intolerant few who live to interfere in the affairs of others, like, say ... may I use the word "Fundie"? Just sitting there and bashing away isn't work for them - it's as if the guy who owns Webring had gone up to a small child and said "I'll be happy to send your whole family to DisneyWorld, but only if you're willing to eat lots of icecream, first" - from the point of view of the person getting the offer, where's the downside? There's the problem - if one lives to bother others, the system is like that, offering power in exchange for the willingness to play. But for everybody else, the sane majority of people who don't want to bother others and don't want to be bothered, themselves, the system isn't structured in such a favorable way.
End result: A lot of Pagan sites are going to get tossed off of a lot of rings. Realistically speaking, what was once a peaceful meeting place for those of all views has become a battlefield where, in the long run, Pagans can't hope to hold their ground. All that they can hope to do is manage an orderly retreat as they look for new ways to keep their sites visible and available for those who are searching. There are a number of possibilities.
There are a number of other ringhosting services - Ringsurf, Ringsworld and the Ringlink systems. There are Internet directories such as dmoz.org and the very well fleshed out one found on this site. There are social networking sites, and maybe those offer the best route of all, because of the interlocking networks of friends that arise on them. There are so many paths leading to a given site, that trying to cut them all becomes futile. But as for leaving most of one's eggs in Webring's basket?
Picture applying to a set of rings, waiting to get accepted, getting in, being in them for a while, but always waiting to get ejected by the next crusader to come along - with the process never ending. You'll no longer be able to just join the rings you're interested in, and be done with it, free to move onto other things. You'll be as the gardener who eternally plants, because the moment he turns his back, somebody is pulling up his flowers.
After a while, that just gets old.
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