WebRing News for gnustep

[webring]

Greetings WebRing Member: gnustep

If this email was received in error, see the bottom of this email for 
instructions on how to cease receiving these announcements.

It has been almost 6 months since we have sent a general email to WebRing 
members.  Much has happened in that time and we feel it is important to contact 
you now to keep you informed and excited about WebRing and to get your feedback 
as we move into the future.

WEBRING FUNDING SURVEY
WebRing is conducting a survey among RingMasters, members, and non-member users 
to determine the best means of generating the resources needed to support and 
grow the WebRing community.  If you have not already done so, please take a 
moment to fill out this questionaire and let us know what you think.  Your 
feedback is important to us AND the rest of the WebRing community.

Who can participate?
Everyone is encouraged to take the survey, even if you don't manage a Ring or 
have a Site in one.  Take the survey here:

http://new.webring.com/h/survey

WEBRING MOUSEPADS!
We have an "official" WebRing mousepad!  We had it designed by our logo design 
contest winner.  We had a small batch made to see how they looked, and they 
look pretty good.  <p>For those interested we're planning on another batch in 
the near future.  If you want to get one you can email to address@hidden and 
let us know you want one and how many you want to reserve.  The cost will 
depend on how many total requests we get, of course, but it will be between $10 
and $15.  A little spendy perhaps but these are very good quality 1/4in rubber 
backed pads, 7in x 9in in size.

Some of the changes/features introduced in the previous couple of months:

WebRing is pleased to announce a mutual promotional arrangement with Meetup, 
Inc.  Meetup is a community oriented Internet service that facilitates local 
meetings between people with common interests.  At coffee shops, restaurants, 
bookstores, pet stores, and other public places are venues for meetups.  Meetup 
will promote WebRing on their site, and WebRing will promote Meetup within our 
directory and Ring hub pages that have opted to join Meetup.  We believe 
face-to-face meetings are a natural extension of the micro-community experience 
that WebRing facilitates in the online world, and both will be stronger through 
joint cooperation.  In the coming months we plan to continue to bring new and 
innovative community tools to the WebRing community.

We encourage RingMasters in particular to explore Meetup and consider the 
possibilities for enhancing the Rings you manage.  Among other things, the 
links pages on meetup topics you may find a number of excellent websites that 
you may wish to invite to join your Ring(s).

You can find Meetup at 
http://www.meetup.com

WebRing also released Forums to general membership in January, 2003.  You may 
or may not have had a chance to visit any WebRing Forums.  If not, we encourage 
you to look at these two general WebRing forums:

http://a.webring.com/forum?forum=webring  - A public forum for any WebRing topic
http://f.webring.com/forum?forum=ringhelp - A forum specifically for help with 
WebRing issues (Site/Ring management, navigation cod, etc.)

We have a forum directory in place now as well, poulated with 5000 plus forums 
already!

We urge all Ring members to join the forums for their Rings.  It is an 
excellent way for members to communicate with other members, communicate with 
the RingMaster, and even other users.  In many respects the Ring's forum is 
much more appropriate, and reliable, for Ring communication than conventional 
email methods.  Give them a try!

A number of other system enhancements are listed on LAST Week's system status 
page at
http://dir.webring.com/h/status20030404

Over the past year as we have completed the move away from Yahoo we have 
explored a number of ways of covering the costs of running the WebRing service. 
 Costs include servers, maintenance, software development and maintenance, 
bandwidth, member support, feature design and development, and hopefully one 
day promotion on the Internet to bring more traffic to WebRing member sites.  
The sources of income are currently external advertising (79%), member 
contributions (20%), and member advertising (1%).  We are strongly considering 
trying to do away with external advertising completely.  In December we started 
a simple poll, asking members to give us their feedback on how WebRing should 
be funded.  External advertising does very poorly indeed, but the poll is 
limited AND very few users have expressed an opinion.  So we are going to ask 
all members to respond to a more involved questionaire regarding this issue.

All we ask is that you please take a moment to review the questionaire, review 
your own situation and wishes with respect to your Internet experience and give 
us your best answers to this important question.  The future direction of the 
WebRing community depends on what it's members want, so the sooner, and more 
carefully, you can respond the better.

The survey can be accessed at:

http://dir.webring.com/h/survey

As always, best wishes,

The WebRing Team

To contribute to WebRing you can use PayPal (or go to the promo page link aboce 
to get our address if you wish to use regular mail):

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=webringinc%40yahoo.com&item_number=gnustep&item_name=WebRing+Support&no_shipping=1&return=http%3A//dir.webring.com/h/thanks&cancel_return=http%3A//dir.webring.com/rw

========================================================
According to our records you have signed up with WebRing, and provided your 
email address for such announcements.  Please do NOT respond to this email.  If 
you don't wish to receive occasional email from WebRing then you will need to 
remove your account from WebRing or ALTER your user profile to specify that 
emails not be sent. 

To alter your profile:
1. Login to your WebRing account.  Your account is gnustep
    http://dir.webring.com/login
2. Click on the Account Info link at the top of the screen.
3. Uncheck the Email Notification box
4.  Save changes

To remove your account:
1. Login to your WebRing account.  Your account is gnustep
    http://dir.webring.com/login
2. Click on the My Rings link at the top of the screen
3. Click the Delete Account link on the bottom left portion of the screen.
NOTE:  You will only SEE the delete link if you have no Ring memberships.  If 
you do, you must remove yourself from those Rings first.

If you cannot log into your User ID, or don't know your password, first try 
having the password emailed to you.  Use the link on the login screen.  If that 
fails then you can contact support for assistance:

http://dir.webring.com/help

Fill out the form that allows you to contact WebRing support and we'll be glad 
to assist you.