Last week we got an email from our webmasters of the "Won't You Wear My TCB-ring"-webring. They were telling the members it was not allowed anymore to be a member of several Elvis-webrings. Our first reaction was "how undemocratic", disregarding the fact we were not addressed directly (the mail said "to whom it may concern").
Of course we contacted the founder of the ring immediately, to find out why. Lex Raaphorst told us they got complaints from visitors about "all those rings" (ed: searching webrings for Elvis Presley gives 18 hits) making things unclear. Also some members were complaining because they thought it was unfair towards the members with only this ring on (causing traffic and loosing it to other rings). They thought about it for some time and finally the ringmasters decided it might be confusing indeed, and maybe even unfair. Knowing at least one of the rings was started because the founder was kicked off of the TCB-ring (because his site was ridiculing Elvis according to most fans), the new policy was announced.
To be honest, we only became a member of the webring to get attention in the first place, as most members probably did. We hardly use any ring on the Net ourselves because we know where to find what we want (at least we think we know). Nonetheless we see the benefits of these things for the "newbies" and considered it to be an easy way to get attention. Of course we thought of joining them all, but at the time it was already clear it didn't make sense because the figures were so different. We checked them for you last weekend once again.
There are three other general Elvis-webrings with more than 5 members: Elvis Remembered, Elvis Is King and I Luv Elvis. These three rings generated about 1500, less than 700 and 169 hits the last eight weeks. This is a little less than the more than 54,000 hits that the TCB-ring generated.
Regarding to Lex Raaphorst the webmasters got about 15 reactions (of almost 200 members) after the decree. Only one of them disagreed and wanted to be a member of as many rings as possible to gain more hits... We doubt if that was a right choice.