bat.nnov.ru was the website of the Bor Association of Manufacturers (Borskaya assotsiatsiya tovaroproizvoditeley, a non-commercial partnership known as "BAT"), a union of industrial, agricultural, construction, transport, and financial organizations of the town of Bor and Bor District in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. The association was listed at the address 606440, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, town of Bor, Lenin Street, DK "Teplokhod" (the "Teplokhod" House of Culture)[1]. The site is known from web archive snapshots starting 17 November 2001[1]; the last snapshot of the home page is dated 24 February 2007[3].

What the association was

As the home page stated, "the Bor Association of Manufacturers was formed on 23 June 1995"[1]. At the time of its formation, according to the same text, the association united 12 large enterprises producing about 75% of the district's industrial output[1]. The site named its founders as the Bor Glass Works, "Nizhny Novgorod Teplokhod," the Bor Pipe Plant, the Bor Silicate Plant, the POSh factory, the "Bor Furniture Maker" factory, the Lindovo Poultry Farm, "BorAvto," the "Borstroy" construction company, the "Lindovsky" state farm, the Bor Commercial Bank, and the MP "Kvarts"[1]. By the time the site existed, membership had grown, according to the home page: "the Association currently comprises 50 industrial and agricultural enterprises, construction, transport, and financial organizations"[1].

What the site looked like

The home page was built as an organizational business card: a brief history, a list of founders, and contact details all on the first screen. Navigation consisted of six sections — "Home," "Bor District," "Business Development Potential," "Areas of Activity," "Member Enterprises of the NP BAT," "Contact"[1].

Leadership was named individually, with direct phone numbers: BAT President Pavel Grigoryevich Lebedev, phone 2-15-30, and Director of the non-commercial partnership BAT Vladimir Alekseyevich Gorshkov, phone 2-32-87[1]. Two separate ways of dialing the same number were listed: phone and fax "within Russia (8-3159) 2-32-87" and "within Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (8-259) 2-32-87"[1] — a dual long-distance code notation typical of the period. The association's email address was set up not on its own domain but on a third-party provider's: np-bat@sandy.ru[1].

The developer changed over time: in the 2001 and 2003 snapshots, the footer reads "Copyrigth © Volgo-Vyatsky Innovation Center VSh" — the misspelling is in the original[1][2], while in the 2007 snapshot the same spot reads "Design: INNOV.RU"[3]. Yet the content of the home page itself did not change over more than five years: the texts of the 2001, 2003, and 2007 snapshots match word for word, down to the phrase "currently"[1][2][3]. No news feed or visitor counters are reflected in the preserved text of the home page.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site operated in the nnov.ru zone and belongs to the Nizhny Novgorod Internet by definition; it entered our materials from the nn.ru directory's category listing, where the association was described with the same phrase about 50 enterprises as on the home page[1]. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating, no visitor data for bat.nnov.ru was recorded, so the size of its audience cannot be judged (the methodology and limitations of these samples are discussed in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating).

In the preserved results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004 — a table with more than a thousand cells linking to participants — the association's site is not listed; of the Bor projects, only the "Bor City Internet Portal" is mentioned there[4]. Judging by the unchanging home page, the site was not designed to compete for visitors: it served as a reference about the organization for those searching for contacts of Bor enterprises.

How it closed

The last web archive snapshot of the home page is dated 24 February 2007[3]; no later versions of the site have survived, and the domain bat.nnov.ru does not respond today. There is no farewell message, relocation notice, or link to a new address on the last preserved page — the site simply stopped updating and disappeared along with its address. What became of the association itself after 2007 cannot be established from the site's surviving materials.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)