At one point in time web rings were one of the best ways to find content on the World Wide Web — involving not just a directory of participating sites, but also each site linking to each other in a ring-like fashion. With search results these days becoming increasingly less useful, having such a focused resource sounds better and better, with the Warp Point directory and web ring now doing just that for video game websites. Topics range from reviews to retro gaming and game development, so there’s probably something for everyone here.
For the reasoning behind this effort take a look at this article by [Wes Fenlon] and [Matt Sayer]. The inspiration was part nostalgia and part longing for the return of a simple system that Just Works™ without algorithms, advertising, ‘AI’ and corporate overlords involved at any point in time. Everything is just focused on helping you find the content and community you were looking for as quickly as possible, though spending a few hours just clicking through the ring is also perfectly fine.
Everyone is free to submit their own awesome site to Warp Point, after which it’ll be manually reviewed. Even if not strictly curated, it would seem to be a refreshing return to a more simpler time, using an approach that should still hold up just as well as it did in 1999.
Although the big commercial web directories like those on Yahoo! quickly became unwieldy and unusable, there’s a lot to be said for having these small, focused web directories and rings to regain that sense of community and humanity that’s become so scarce on the WWW in 2026.
Does anybody know some web rings worth sharing?
Might be worth checking these: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
I used to be in a web ring in like 1997. I have a version of the NY Times Spelling Bee that you can play in competition with friends (it uses the same game for the day but keeps its own database of your progress, which your friends can see). It’s not a “video game” — it’s more of a word game. But I wanted to submit it and all they want appear to be blogs. Anyway, this is that:
https://randomsprocket.com/spellingbee/
and it’s open source!
https://github.com/judasgutenberg/networked_spellingbee
Perhaps it was declined due to the foul language?
As one of the Owners/Devs of WebRing.com (Starseed before the GeoCities/Yahoo buyout) its great to see the spirit is still alive!
Yahoo directories didn’t become unwieldy. The communities were running just fine. Yahoo decided to stop being what they were and wanted to be everything else, buying companies, expanding into email (and buying email companies). They completely stopped support for the lists for several years, and it was find because it was working and didn’t need meddling with.
That they shut them down was about rebranding more than any statement on the usefulness of the site at the time as it was.