It's huge size means that the ring no longer can effectively serve its original purpose: to create a chill network of likeminded folks who run personal and creative websites, who sort of know each other in passing and associate with one another occasionally. Its now excessive size makes it easy for one to become lost among a ring of strangers, where it's kind of just popular to join for the sake of joining, rather than some common purpose. Its size also makes it very difficult if not impossible to ensure the webring stays unbroken (with everyone using the widget, URLs breaking, etc.)
Unfortunately, the webring has become popular and well-known enough that I have seen our webring advertised on reddit and hackernews as a "great webring to join to boost your SEO and build up your backlinks". It made me realize how many people viewed the webring as a kind of billboard they could add their site to, in order to get it more clicks, without otherwise participating or interacting with the members. I remembered "big" webrings feeling this way back in the day, and that's not something I'm interested in replicating. At some point it just loses its meaning.
If you're on the webring, here's what this means: On the widgets, I WAS thinking of disabling the 'next/previous/random' functionality and leaving it up to the website owner to keep it up as a badge or take it down altogether... but ran into some problems doing this with the way the ring was coded, so I settled for changing the error message to a 'friendlier' explanation. So you should probably take the code down if you still have it! (The reason why I don't want to leave the webring members list up as-is and simply close new registrations is because of the maintenance that has to happen behind the scenes: checking periodically for sites that have gone down or changed URLs, people requesting to be removed or renamed, etc.) It feels like I'd be crossing a privacy boundary by abandoning a webring that people have no say in removing themselves from anymore. At the same time, people have been archiving the webring's members list, so in a way it will continue to exist in a read-only state.
As of tonight, I closed the submission page to the webring. If you've applied but you're not on there yet, you're probably one of the 170+ in the queue... I'm sorry about that