I dont know myself what protocols there are..I was merely drawing attention to the fact that there were links to this site on Vtuner...I only spotted them today myself.
I suspect that the argument will go that there is a convention that links to a site are posted with that site owners permission/approval, as a gesture of good neighbourliness, but that also seeing as the world wide web is a network of interconnected links, then that's the whole point of putting up a website.. the expectation that others will link to it, which is the way it seems to me that webrings work.
Its an interesting discussion, and may be a bit off topic..but what do others think?
