concorde.ru — the website of Konkord, a Nizhny Novgorod firm that sold computers and office equipment. In the "Nizhny Novgorod OnLine" site directory (nn.ru) this domain carried five separate listings for the one company: Konkord itself, a real-estate agency, a construction company, office furniture, and a heraldry section[3][4][5][6][7]. Before it had its own domain, the firm lived in the Nizhny Novgorod zone: in the nn.ru directory of 2000, Konkord is recorded at the address concorde.nnov.ru[1]. The earliest surviving snapshot of concorde.ru is dated April 2, 2001[2].

From the nn.ru directory to its own domain

In the nn.ru directory, a snapshot of which survives from October 2000, Konkord stood among the Nizhny Novgorod computer firms — alongside ZAO "Center for Computer Technologies May" (Tsentr Kompyuternykh Tekhnologiy May), the company Makros, and OAO "Computer Center — NN". The catalog line described it as: "Computers and office equipment, risographs and post-press equipment, barter and offsetting deals..."; the address given was concorde.nnov.ru, the check date was July 25, 2000, and the status was "Under reconstruction"[1].

From the first surviving snapshot of concorde.ru itself (April 2, 2001) only a single line of text can be extracted — "OOO firma Konkord" ("Konkord LLC")[2]. Neither an address, a phone number, nor a list of goods survived on this early page.

Five signs under one domain

The nn.ru catalog described the firm's main profile as follows: "Comprehensive solutions for corporate clients. Computers, laptops, handheld computers, peripheral equipment, network solutions, software, office equipment, risographs and post-press equipment, service and maintenance"[3]. The other lines of business received their own entries in the catalog, each leading to its own section of the same site.

The "Konkord Real Estate Agency" — at concorde.ru/nedv_r/, described as "All types of real estate transactions"; in the June 2002 snapshot the listing stood among Nizhny Novgorod realtors, alongside the Bor Real Estate Center and the agency Triumf-Realty[4]. The "Konkord Construction Company" — at concorde.ru/stroy_r/, described as "All types of construction activity. Air conditioners, ventilation and heating equipment. Design, installation, maintenance"[5]. "Konkord Office Furniture" — at concorde.ru/mebel/, described as "Multifunctional office furniture, partitions, conference add-ons, suspended ceilings and accessories"[6]. Finally, the section concorde.ru/herald/ was listed under the name "Heraldry": "Coats of arms, emblems, commemorative medals and souvenirs, facsimile copies of weapons, bas-reliefs"[7].

None of these pages themselves appear in the snapshots available to us — the four side lines of business are known only from the catalog entries.

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

Next to each listing the catalog displayed a rating. For Konkord's main page it grew noticeably: 36.21 in the snapshot of April 25, 2002[3], and 152 and 192 in different categories in the November 2003 snapshots[9][8]. The figures for the side listings were far more modest: 24 for the real-estate agency in June 2002[4], 5 for the construction company in September 2002[5], 1.91 for "Heraldry" in April 2002[7]; against the furniture listing in the 2003 snapshot it read "Rating: none"[6]. On how the rating itself worked and what its figures meant, see Counter.nn.ru and the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The site does not appear in the surviving results table for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote of 2004[10]; it likewise does not appear in the samples of counter top lists available to us. In other words, for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet this was a typical corporate site: prominent within its own catalog category, but not on the city-wide lists.

The fate of the address

By 2013 the domain hosted not a shop but an unfinished placeholder site. The menu listed "Our Sites," "Join Our Team," "Q5 Telecommunications," "Demo Hall Site," "Online Store," "Contact Us," "Order Services," "Technical Support," and "Konkord.Ru Site." As the home page put it, "We are glad to see you on our site!" — below which ran the standard English boilerplate text of an unfilled Ruby on Rails scaffold, advising the visitor to create models and run a database migration[11].

The snapshot from January 18, 2017 caught, in place of a page, an open directory listing on the web server: Apache 2.4.9 under Windows, PHP 5.5.11. The root held dozens of deployed engines and storefronts — Joomla, Bitrix, Drupal, Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, TYPO3, UMI.CMS, NetCat, Amiro, WordPress, phpBB, vTiger CRM, ZenCart — along with an access.log request log 608 MB in size; the file dates span 2009–2015[12]. This set is consistent with the "Demo Hall" promised in the 2013 menu — a showcase of ready-made engines for clients.

After that, no substantive snapshots appeared in the web archive: the last snapshot of the home page in our sample is dated March 20, 2022. When checked in August 2026, the site at this address was responding.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, computer firms section, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, Konkord company listing, 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, Konkord real-estate agency listing, 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, Konkord construction company listing, 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, "Konkord Office Furniture" listing, 2003 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, "Heraldry" listing, 2002 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, Konkord listing rating, November 2003 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalog, Konkord listing rating, November 2003 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)
  11. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  12. web.archive.org — Home page, 2017 (archive)