4 ROOM (foroom.boom.ru) — page of a Nizhny Novgorod graffiti-writing crew, hosted at a third-level address in the boom.ru domain. The browser window's title read "4 ROOM - NN," the banner in the header said "GRAFFITI FLAVA OF DA NN," and the authors introduced themselves like this: "4 ROOM WRITERS - We are number ONE in NN. Zmey, Stels, Stix (aka Serge), Stan."[1] The nn.ru catalog listed the site in the category "Society and Nizhny Novgorodians: Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorodians" under the name "Graffiti," with the description "A personal page for fans of cave painting."[5] All the page's content is dated June 2000, and the last web-archive snapshot is from January 2002.[2]

What the site looked like

The page was laid out as a single table on a black background with turquoise text, fitting entirely on one screen.[1] The left blue column carried the crew's self-introduction, below it the signature "cont@ct" and the email address stan1@uic.nnov.ru in the Nizhny Novgorod domain uic.nnov.ru, and beneath that a regional counter button labeled "NN counter top100," registered under number 996.[1]

The center column held a block titled "NeWs & хР'DATEs" with two entries. The entry from June 16, 2000 — "Scetches of WallSide (first crew of Cheboxary)" — linked to twenty numbered pictures; the entry from June 7, 2000 — "Stan's old scetches" — linked to fourteen sketches whose file names read on their own like a list of subjects: graffer, breaker, monstr, scream, redman, murz, spring.[1] The site had no other sections: everything else was only listed as planned, and those plans were spelled out on the home page in a single line — "Sketchi, peaces, bombs, articles, links... All Dat Will Be... may be...," meaning sketches, pieces, bombing, articles and links would appear someday, "maybe."[1] At the bottom of the center column was a link, "Nizhny Novgorod hip-hop project www.hiphop.nn.ru," and the right column held four external links: Zmogk Art, UAM-Rostov, an OUTLINE banner, and ART CRIME.[1] The page closed with the note: "done: 07.06.2000 by Stan - design пока отсутствует..." (design not yet in place).[1] Between the snapshots of March 9, 2001 and January 26, 2002, the page's text did not change by a single word.[2]

Place in the The Internet

The site was connected to Counter.nn.ru under number 996 and appeared in the regional counter's public tables — these remain the only independent measure of its visibility (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). In the "Projects" section as of September 30, 2000, the page stood at row 120: counter 9, rating 0.15, hits 0.[3] As of November 9, 2000 — row 127, counter 14, rating 0.25.[4] Its neighbors in the table were far busier addresses: the Auto.nn.ru with 1,839 hits and the "VanoA.rt" web studio with 1,425, against nine and fourteen for the graffiti writers.[3][4] The counter itself described the site differently than the catalog did: "4 ROOM WRITAZ — a site of Nizhny Novgorod graffiti writers: Stan, Stix, Stels and Zmey."[3]

So the page lived in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet under three different names at once — "4 ROOM - NN" on the site itself, "4 ROOM WRITAZ" in the counter, and "Graffiti" in the nn.ru catalog, where it was rated 0.56 in April 2002 and 4 in July of that same year.[5][6]

How it closed

Updates to the page stopped almost immediately: the last news item is dated June 16, 2000, the layout designer's signature is dated June 7, 2000, and every surviving snapshot, from March 2001 to January 2002, shows the same page.[1][2] The nn.ru catalog registered this before the web archive did: both in April and in July 2002, the link to "Graffiti" was listed not among personal pages in general but in their subsection "Abandoned pages."[5][6]

The web archive's first capture of the address is dated January 24, 2001, the last — January 26, 2002; its index holds eight records for this address in total.[7] What happened to the address afterward we do not know: no availability check was ever set up for it, and the web archive finds no page there after January 2002.[7]

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, «Projects» section rating, September 30, 2000 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, «Projects» section rating, November 9, 2000 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, «Society and Nizhny Novgorodians: Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorodians: Abandoned pages» section, April 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, same section, sorted by check date, July 2002 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — List of foroom.boom.ru snapshots in the web archive (archive)