Thanks for applying to my ring. Before you continue, though, we need to get a few points straight. This may seem a little unfriendly, maybe even a little rude if you're not coming here with the intention of doing any of the things I'm about to talk about, but there are some people who seem to live just to get in other people's faces, and most of them seem to have Internet accounts. Laying down the law in advance for those people is generally a prudent idea.

1. I run this ring as I see fit. While I'm not a big one for prying into the affairs of the members of my rings, or trying to tell them what they can or can't put on my pages, I do reject the so-called "ethical ringmaster" concept. I accept or reject, keep or delete sites as my own conscience and best judgement dictate, and I don't try to straightjacket either of those with some pre-conceived set of rules. Attempts to play "lawyer" with me will get you nowhere, and attempts to play politics with me will get you nowhere you want to be.



2. I reserve the right to reject any site for any reason, or for no reason at all. I also reserve the right to ignore netiquette, a concept I've never held any respect for (seeing it as being little more than manipulative, institutionalized whining), and will gleefully repost any message I consider sufficiently uncivil or otherwise annoying in the location or locations of my choice. Yes, even if you stick a copyright notice on it. Good luck getting one of those to stand up in court.



3. I am not impressed by the concept of "argument by assertion". If you want to get in on the strength of your philosophy, I expect to see solid, logical arguments in support of your positions. "I feel really strongly about this" is not a solid, logical argument, no matter what your assertiveness training coach may have told you.



4. SSNB is required of applicants, as is a reasonable degree of webring navigability. I'm not going to insist on seeing a link back to the webring page from EVERY page on your site. That isn't reasonable, especially for large sites. I do, however, expect to see the process of finding one's way back to the ring from anywhere in your site made easy and straightforward.
   
   If you'd like to see one approach to doing so, consider what I've done on the Halls of Eternal Disbelief. All pages feed off of and ultimately return one to a main page, on which one can find a menu of links for returning to webring, categorized by point of entry; to avoid running into it would take a small amount of ingenuity. Putting this together took a small amount of effort; maintaining it is trivial, and I didn't have to redesign my whole site to do it.
   
   Something to consider, and a darned site more pleasant than failing your code checks because the Webring team decides that you have a "one way site", don't you think?



5. I've said this before, but I'll say it again. You need to ask me to open the ring for you before applying to it. If you haven't bothered to do so, and you try to use this form, you're going to hit a brick wall. This and more gets explained on this page, but suffice it to say that you need to sign up for this list, do a post about your site in which you mention that you'd like to join this ring - and specify which ring, because I run more than one. If I like your site and think it would be a good fit for this ring, I'll open the ring for you and invite you to complete the process.

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Café Satan's Ring of Eternal Damnation