Web rings
Web rings provide the World Wide Web with a different way to organize Web sites. The Web ring is a way to group together sites with similar content (or any pages at all, if one so desires) by linking them together in a circle, or ring.

A Web ring is a ring of sites all on the same topic. The idea is that on each page a code is placed that links to other pages in the ring. They are all in some kind of order and you would see several options to click on such as: Next, Skip the Next, Back, Skip the one behind, Two ahead, and Random. Users clicking on one of these buttons first go to the central Web ring system dispatcher and from there they are sent to the appropriate site in the Web ring.

This is actually something you can do without the Web ring system by simply having each page owner link their site to the next. However, when somebody wants to join the ring, someone has to edit their page to point to the new page and -- when the ring gets big enough -- it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring intact when pages disappear and servers go down.

The Web ring concept provides a solution to all of these problems, as well as numerous enhancements. When you join a Web ring, the HTML code on your home page never changes. Links point to a special program at the Web ring host that will send people to the next (or previous) site in the ring. Because the central ring database is located in one location, sites can be added and removed quickly and easily, and because the Web ring server allows you go continue past sites that are unreachable, you will always be able to continue around the loop.

A central operator of Web rings is http://www.webring.com. We list a number of Notes and Domino-related Web rings in the product availability and resources section at the end of this article.

List Servers
In its' simplest form, a list server is an automated mail forwarder. It maintains a series of mail lists that users have the ability to add (subscribe) to or remove (unsubscribe) themselves from. Messages sent to the list server are directed towards a specific list, and the list server forwards those messages to all the subscribers of the list.