814.nn.ru was the home page of student group 814 of the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod, admitted in 1994[1]. The site was the personal work of one person: the header of the main page read "Made by Zax," and the footer read "(c) 2000 Zax"[1]. Judging by the copyright notice, the page appeared in 2000, six years after the enrollment it was dedicated to; the surviving snapshots of the main page cover the year 2001[1][4].
What the site looked like
The main page was arranged in the simplest possible way: a title, a three-line subtitle, and a list of sections, each beginning with an ellipsis. As the main page itself put it, the site introduced itself thus: "Web page of group 814 of the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod, admitted in 1994"[1].
In the earliest surviving snapshot, dated January 24, 2001, there were four sections: "People," "Photographs," "Forum," and "Web resources of our group"[1]. There was no address, phone number, or schedule on the main page — only the section names and the author's signature. The page's meta fields listed the keywords "zax 814 NNGU Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod"[1]. The text was laid out in the KOI8-R encoding[1].
What changed over nine months
Four snapshots of the main page, spread across 2001, offer a rare chance to see how a small student site grew. By March 1, 2001, a fifth menu item had been added — "Student stories of Russia"[2]. The page remained the same on May 19, 2001[3].
The last change is visible in the snapshot from September 28, 2001: alongside the active forum, a separate item, "Forum (archive)," appeared[4]. This is the only indirect evidence that the group's forum lived long enough and accumulated enough messages that its older part had to be moved into an archive. Not a single message from that forum has survived: the web archive preserved only the main page.
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site's connection to Nizhny Novgorod needs no proof: it lived in the nn.ru zone and was dedicated to a group at a local university[1]. In our data it is listed under the nn.ru directory, with the category description "Photographs, forum, student stories" — that is, in the directory it stood alongside city-wide sites, even though it was the home page of a single study group.
No traces of the site could be found in public measurements of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating, no figures for it were recorded, so we cannot judge its traffic — see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. The surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote does not mention the domain 814.nn.ru[5]; according to our data, by that time the site had already gone three years without an update.
How it closed
The last snapshot of the main page in the web archive is dated September 28, 2001[4]. We have no later saved copies, and no evidence remains of exactly how the site's operation ended. A check of the address 814.nn.ru, made while preparing this article, received no response: the domain no longer exists.
What remains of the site is four snapshots of the same main page, a list of five or six menu items, and the author's signature. The web archive preserved no photographs, no list of people, and no student stories — only the shell survived, listing what once was inside.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, January 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, March 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, May 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, September 2001 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)