Who can join
The Ring is open to any genuine barbecue-related website. Over the years members have included:
- Home pitmasters and backyard cooks sharing recipes and cook diaries
- Competition teams documenting the circuit
- Builders showing off their homemade pits and smokers
- Suppliers of smoking woods, rubs, and equipment
- Regional and style-specific barbecue enthusiasts of every stripe
The one requirement is simple: your site should be a real contribution to the barbecue web — something a fellow enthusiast would be glad to have stumbled onto by hitting Random Site.
How membership works
When you join, your site takes its place in the ring between two neighbors. You add a small navigation strip to your pages — the classic Next, Previous, and Random links — that ties your site into the loop. Visitors traveling the ring arrive at your site from the one before you and continue on to the one after you, so every member both receives and sends along traffic. It is a fair, friendly exchange: everyone helps everyone else get discovered.
Because the Ring is a curated neighborhood rather than an open directory, new sites are reviewed to make sure they are on-topic and working before they are woven into the loop. That light touch is what keeps the quality up and the experience pleasant for everyone browsing.
What you get out of it
Membership brings discovery that a search engine cannot: real visitors who love barbecue, arriving because a neighbor's site sent them your way. You also join a community with a long history of showing up for one another — from competition meetups to the community cooks documented in our news. And you become part of preserving one of the internet's oldest and friendliest barbecue traditions.
Ready to join?
If you would like to add your barbecue site to The Smoke Ring, reach out through our contact page and tell us about your site. We will help you get set up in the neighborhood. Not sure how the ring works yet? Read how a webring works first, then come back and claim your spot on the loop.