I operated a webring for my university, eventually breaking it into separate rings for students, alumni, and fans of the sports programs. The biggest issue was

I operated a webring for my university, eventually breaking it into separate rings for students, alumni, and fans of the sports programs. The biggest issue was people who would sign up but never would insert the required code into their page for the navigation to appear. In most cases, it didn't seem like they were trying to be freeloaders getting inbound traffic while prohibiting outbound but rather that writing HTML was still relatively new and many people were following along with tutorials, making simple substitutions for colors and adding individual links but got confused when they needed to add a big block of html table code. A few were semi-freeloading in that they insisted the inbound link be to their index.html but the ring code that enabled outbound links were hidden at the bottom of another page. There were various scripts created for managing such issues but it didn't seem worth the hassle so I ended up letting the rings decay until eventually pulling the plug when leaving for grad school.