SandridgeFarm@xxxxxxx wrote:
Yes, I see webrings as important to the persons who share the same
interest or topic of the webring. A sort of small community, with
the only thing missing being a way for members of that community to
interact with each other.
Even if I agree that webrings are great platforms for building web
communities, I wouldn't agree on "missing". A webring is a webring. ;-)
You mention a 'guestbook', but maybe what every webring needs is a
mailing list with archive. Unfortunately the so called 'free' mail
lists are cluttered with banner adds and pop-ups and destroy not
enhance the webring experience......
Anyone had success running a self hosted webring mailing list?
Yes. Please allow me to refer to my own ring again:
http://www.quotationring.net/mailinglist.html
So, how do I do that? There are two parts:
1) My web hosting account includes the possibility to run (ad free)
mailing lists, so the actual mailing list is such a list.
2) The mailing list archive is maintained using the MHonArc program
(http://www.mhonarc.org/). MHonArc is primarily targeted at people who
run their own servers, such as web hosting providers, but I have never
'accepted' that. Instead I wrote a script whose purpose is to make it
easy to install and run MHonArc on a web hosting account on a shared
server with FTP access: http://www.gunnar.cc/mhonarc/mhastart.pl.html
That script is now included as a "contribution" in the MHonArc
distribution, so MHonArc can indeed be used by 'ordinary' people as
well. :)
Btw, this solution is also applied for the mailing list at World of
Webrings (http://www.webringworld.org/).
Another option to let the members in a webring interact with each
other is to set up a message board. Even if I never have done it
myself, I know that there are lots of such Perl and PHP scripts out there.
Personally I prefer mailing lists. Solutions where you need to log in
somewhere, in order to follow a discussion, are less congenial to me.
/ Gunnar