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What is this webring about? As is the case with so much else on the Internet: cascading wrongness. Let me give you an example of what is getting to be more and more typical of the experience some of us are having with Webring and its so-called support staff, something annoying enough to inspire me to create a ring in their dishonor. There has been plenty to be annoyed with, quite frequently. Consider the occasions on which I and a few of my online acquaintences have received e-mails from Webring support threatening us with the imminent placement of our rings up for adoption if we did not do immediate maintenance on them, logged in, found that the navigation rating of our rings was what it was when we logged in (100, a perfect score), there were no pending or suspended sites, and everything was up and running; we couldn't fix the problems that the sabre rattling letters were sent about, because there literally were no problems to fix. How can one do better than to get a perfect score? Asking such inescapable questions of support left us the recipient of more sabre rattling letters in which we were threatened with the termination of our Webring.com memberships if we spoke back to these individuals, again. But the question posed by one of those targeted remains a valid one, unanswered to this day by anything but anonymous chest thumping - "if somebody hallucinates a problem into existence where none exist in reality, how am I supposed to fix that? Webring's only response to this, something that in no way qualifies as an answer, was a pridefully arrogant announcement that they weren't even going to bother to check their logs to see if we were telling the truth, which, of course, we were. A decision that I had to make was which category to put it in. Initially, I put it in the regional Chicago metro category, but after a while started rethinking that decision. Certainly, the ring didn't need to be there for local photographers to find it - it was already a member of as number of other local rings. By being placed there, the ring put its member sites in a location in which many of those who might have wanted to visit, weren't necessarily in a position to think of doing so. Given the size of our city and its considerable, if fading, role in the history of American architecture, images of Chicago are surprisingly few in number, online, almost all of those images being stereotypical shots of the Loop, or drab convention shots. A casual surfer would have every reason to doubt that he'd find images by going into our regional category. On the other hand, those looking for images would have ever reason to expect to find them in the photography category, and those who were curious about out city might be pleasantly surprised to see that listing, and interested enough to come take a look. There already was a Photography category that I was familiar with, listed under the Visual Arts subcategory of the Fine Arts subcategory of the Entertainment and Arts category at Webring. That sounds like a lot of nesting, doesn't it? I knew where that category was, because I already had a page located in some rings located on it, which I had come across when looking over a few photo pages other people had done. But looking at a category defined as being Home > Entertainment & Arts > Fine Arts > Visual Arts > Photography with each of those levels of hierarchy representing a choice to be made among a dozen or more subcategories, one is left with the impression that a visitor would almost have to be psychic to find the path to that category on his own. Given how slowly I'd seen the Webring.com search engine work on occasion, I knew that sometimes, "on your own" is what a search for a category comes down to. There are good navigational reasons to not want a hierarchy of categories to not develop too many levels. With considerable interest, then, one day I noted that a new photography category, one located in a far less deep and hard to find location: Home > Entertainment & Arts > Photography Webring had seemed to sense the problem with the old category, and had apparently acted on it, quite recently I guessed, given the note I saw as I clicked on this category: "Be the first to create a "Entertainment_&_Arts/Photography/" Ring." Nobody had set up a ring in this category, yet! It looked like a good thing to get my ring involved in. Little did I know that I was about to step into a booby trap. Very quickly, my ring vanished from the old photography category, but it couldn't be found in the new category, the one higher up in the hierarchy, closer to Home. At first, I was not concerned by this. Rings often take 24 hours to appear in a new location, after a category change. But five days later, it still wasn't to be found anywhere in the listings. My ring still existed, technically, but for all practical intents and purposes it had vanished; without knowing that said ring existed (and what its url was), somebody wandering through the Webring site would never be able to find it. Even doing a search under "Chicago, amateur and photography", it came up many pages into listings of rings that had nothing to do with Chicago, well past the point at which almost anybody would have given up looking. My willingness to go along with what seemed to be Webring.com's effort to reorgnize its hierarchy of categories into something less cumbersome was being punished. I and my ring had been buried by Webring.com. At first, I thought of this as being nothing more than just another system bug, something that Webring.com had been seeing more than a few of, for a while since the system's upgrade. I wrote to support, though now I wish that I hadn't. Using the help form on the Webring.com site, I sent a reasonably friendly message explaining the problem. You know, giving support an opportunity to do what they've supposedly been hired to do?
Never announce your intentions to Support. I then went into the forum of a ring that my ring belonged to, in order to send a head's up out to the other members: (1 2 3)
Having done what I could on my own behalf, and on behalf of my fellow users, I then waited to hear back from support. A reasonable query asked in a reasonable and a friendly way should get a reasonable and friendly response, wouldn't you agree? What I got was anything but. Remember that listing of member sites which you saw above? Count them - three, right? This is not a judgement call, something that reasonable people can agree to disagree about, this is a matter of just simple, basic reality. What does it tell you about where a discussion is headed, when reality is the first thing to go out the window?
It would be fair to say that I was floored by this response. Yes, as I've already said, outrageousness is what I expect on the Internet, but this takes it to a new level. You have somebody who is supposedly doing his job, who is dealing with the report of a problem with the system, responds by lying through his anonymous teeth. Yes, anonymous. I don't know which employee of Webring sent that message. Everything that I saw in the header, you saw there, which points to a basic problem with Webring's management that should seem eerily familiar to those who've dealt with misbehaving operators on the telephone - lack of accountability. This, I would suggest, is the reason why one hears as many reports of abuse directed toward ringmasters and other users of Webring as one does - the employee in Support knows that he can be as out of line as he wants, and that there will be no consequences for him, because nobody will know who he is. So why not take the frustrations of the day out on whoever is unlucky enough to have written in to him, even if what he is frustrated with is the fact that so many users are failing to mind their places, and expecting him to do his job! Is there any way to view this unknown individual's remark as being anything other than a baldfaced lie? Not really, as we see if we go to the webring creation page, where we find this passage:
There is nothing ambiguous about this. When the policy statement is made, that one needs three memberships in a ring to keep it active, the memberships spoken of are those of the individual pages, not those of the individual people owning the pages. This much should be common sense; any other policy would guarantee that a new ring would be stuck in a chicken and the egg situation, unable to get listed because only its founder had sites in the ring, and thus unable to gain visibility and attract new members. This much can also be seen by looking at the listing of sites in the Webring category devoted to Webrings, and finding these rings held by James Huggins (1 2 3 4) and this one somebody set up to show off his (or her) sites, to list a few that I was able to find within a few minutes of looking. This unknown employee's actions were not backed up by any policy that Webring has ever stated or enforced; they were an exercise in power hunger dictated capriciousness, as one can see by what followed next. While this individual was being generally arbitrary and grossly exceeding his authority, my interest was not in getting him (or her) disciplined, it was in no longer being hassled. My desire was to get this situation worked out, and as I was clearly not going to be seeing any help from Webring, I tried to work past this apparent system bug on my own. Am I being unduly pessimistic, in saying that no help could possibly come from Support? Not really - consider the correspondence that had since occured. In stunned disbelief at what I had seen, I wrote
following up with a mild piece of reasonable indignation, as the reality of the response I was getting sank in:
In return, I got back this piece of unprofessional shamelessness:
Certainly not what past directions had said; "a minimum of three sites in the ring" and "more than three sites" are not synonymous. Anything to avoid admitting that there was a problem, eh boys? Whoever I was hearing back from was trying to BS his way out of the complaint; first he tells me that my site isn't list because it has fewer than three sites (blatantly untrue); now his position was that this was the case because it had three sites in it? Am I to take it that he was unable to count? He's having a hard time keeping his story straight. Seeing nothing better than an extended stonewalling in my immediate future, I deleted the ring, creating a new ring with the same settings, which I then moved the sites from the old ring to. In some ways, this much was even a step up up, as the new ring id ("chicagophotos") would possibly be better at giving relevent search words to the search engine spiders than the old one did ("amateurchicago"; amateur WHAT in Chicago?). For good measure, I then asked a few people I knew to submit pages to the new ring. Those pages would still be under construction, but now I would have over three different individual webring.com memberships associated with sites on the ring - even under the skewed interpretation of the rules set forth by somebody who was "staging his own little revolt against his employer", as we came to describe the situation, this ring would have enough members to be listed. In fact, once all of the applications were in and processed, the ring would have at least six distinct sites on it - twice the number needed to be active and listed according to the rules Webring.com really did put in place, as opposed to the ones which an insubordinate, anonymous employee was putting into place, just because he felt like it. Guess which ring still wasn't appearing in the listings a few days later, even though it had already had plenty of time to appear in them, since it was set up? Based on what I had already seen from Webring, my best guess was that somebody went out and made a conscious effort to thwart my attempt to get past that system bug, assuming that it was a system bug and not system operator interference that caused the problem in the first place. If so, this would be ego taken to the point of borderline psychosis - not only was this person, whoever he or she was, going to lie pathologically to defend his decision to not do his job and help, but he was going to fight to keep the damage done by his uncooperative attitude alive. That is pretty darned whacky. Now you see why I wish that I hadn't written to support. Throughout the entire incident, they were nothing but a liability. That's one of the morals to this story - if you have a problem, if you come across a bug in the system, whatever you do, don't write to Support because they'll only fight to make matters worse. But if that's true, as it clearly is, then what are they good for? Responding to user concerns is what they've been hired to do, and as you saw in this case, they've been known to respond to the expression of those concerns in punitive manner, sabotaging that which they've been hired to fix. At least, that's what this guy did, and this was apparently not the only time somebody had such an experience with Support. Such an incident is so jaw dropping in its inappropriateness that as it happens around one, one has to struggle to convince oneself that it is really happening. But it is, and one should make an effort to learn from the experience. This ring, hosted on a competing ring provider, is a place where one can share such experiences, those moments in which Webring.com and its staff left your jaw dropping, as you went "huh?", not able to believe something that you know you just saw. I won't say "have fun"; this isn't fun. This is about anger and exasperation, about management carried out as a form of trolling, about little men with large egos making larger problems for users who've done nothing to deserve them. Were Webring.com just another provider, users would probably have told them to get lost, en masse, years ago; alas, many of the search engines play favorites when it comes to Webring, and so many of us find ourselves trapped into doing business with a company that shows its users and ringmasters little, if any respect, having to do so just to get their sites seen and their sides of the story heard. Cascading wrongs, indeed - one is driven from one problem to the other, wondering what is next, and that's what's wrong with this, why "let the market take care of it" is an inadequate response. Why there is a real issue of injustice involved in the way Webring.com abuses its users, and its clout among the search engines. No, I won't tell you to have fun, but I will tell you that you're not alone, and that for all of the loudmouths you'll run into who'll make excuses for the inexcusable, that there will be people who will read your story, and see unacceptable behavior for what it is. I know that such stories are out there; I've seen them written about online. I hope that a few of those who've had similar bad times will take advantage of this chance to be heard, and sign up for my little ring. It's easy, and if nothing else, it is free. Aftermath, sort of (the issue is still not resolved, weeks later) - my patience finally being used up, I started getting a little more directly to the point. Let's remember that a company is never a monolithic entity, and that much that is bad in a corporate culture can come from the bottom, instead of from the top. I decided to try that idea out, and see if it applied to this case.
I got yet another response in which, yet again, their story changed. We're going to watch their boy argue that the more deeply buried Photography subcategory is the new one. I suspect that I'm being BSed yet again, but ... um, OK, let's see if this works. Rather cleverly, whoever sent it managed to kill the carriage return so that, unlike the way you are seeing this letter on this page, all of the text on my screen ended up on the same line - a true joy to read. They never miss a trick, do they? Here's the letter.
Oh, for crying out loud! Let's say, just for the sake of discussion, that Support has decided to break with established precedent and say something that bears some connection to reality. Then why didn't they just say that a while back and save their customer (me) a world of trouble? Where is the sense in telling somebody what he should be doing, in order to do something that can't be done, because of some policy change that they haven't told the general public about? Giving bad information and lying to the user about his own ring, all along the way at that? Did I actually get through to a supervisor this time? Am I being handed something other than pasty, bubbling fertilizer at last? I don't know and suspect that I may be enroute to my next round of "Red Rover", but what the (bleep!)? A category change is the easiest of things to do, so I'll give it a try. But at this point, the kindest thing one can possibly end up saying, when all is resolved (should that ever happen), is that Support was stubbornly, willfully incompetent; I believe that "passive aggressive" is the expression for that - and that's the best possibility left! No wonder these people stay anonymous. Would you want to go down on record as having provided service like this? "And this is what I should expect, if I become a ringmaster at Webring.com?", you ask. No. This was actually one of the better moments. Just imagine what the worst ones are like. (Epilogue - in the case of that last message from support, they finally did seem to have given me accurate information for a change, and all that I had to do was threaten them to get it. That, and go through everything I described above and write a page about it. The resurrected ring is now visible in the listings). This is very easy, even if I should have the ring closed right now. All that you have to do is go over to my homelist, sign up and post a request to join the ring. Even if the ring is open, posting that message is a good idea, as doing so lets me know that somebody is waiting, resulting in quicker service for you. This ring is solely for those who are posting a complaint about Webring, Webring support and the service that has been seen from these. You don't have to be invariably hostile toward Webring.com; I'm not. You just have to have a reasonable grievance with them, reasonably expressed. Oh, and no, I won't carry any rebuttal pages written by a true geeky believer who wants to speak up and say that Webring can do no wrong, or something like that. This ring doesn't need to give equal time; with all of the visibility Webring.com enjoys and the presence of rings like "Support helped me", which predates this ring by years, this little ring is equal time. Nothing more to see here, so let's go to the ring. (This page is hosted on Joseph Dunphy's Cowboy Wannabee Site).
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