crb.shax.ru was the address of the website of the Shakhunya Central District Hospital, which operated in the early 2000s in Shakhunya, a district center of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. The site was conceived as a brief reference about the hospital: the home page's title read "Shakhunskaya TsRB" [Shakhunya CDH], and its description was "Central district hospital of Shahunya. Шахунская Центральная районная больница. Немного общей информации" [A little general information][1]. By 2004 the same address hosted no longer a hospital site but an amateur city portal, "Virtual Shakhunya," built on the PHP-Nuke engine and never filled with content[2]. The domain made it into the Nizhny Novgorod nn.ru directory as the hospital's site, and it was from there that it was picked up for our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The hospital site

The earliest surviving snapshot was taken on August 3, 2003, but the page itself is marked with the date "November 29, 2001" and the line "© 2001 Shakhunya Central District Hospital" — meaning that by the time of the capture the content had not been updated for about a year and a half[1].

The page was built with frames, and what actually made it into the web archive was effectively a single stub for old browsers: "This page uses frames, but your browser does not support them," as the home page reported[1]. Because of this the site's sections were not preserved: only service lines survived — the email address crb@shax.ru and a set of keywords that reveal the site's intended structure: "hospital, polyclinic, inpatient department, therapy, surgery, ambulance, doctor, physician, Shakhunya"[1]. There is neither a postal address nor a phone number on the surviving part of the page.

"Virtual Shakhunya"

By the summer of 2004 a different site stood at crb.shax.ru — "Virtual Shakhunya" with the description "Welcome to Shakhunya," made on the free PHP-Nuke engine ("Web site engine's code is Copyright © 2002 by PHP-Nuke")[2]. On the left was the standard module menu for this engine: Home, Stories Archive, "Account," "Submit News," "Feedback," "Surveys," "Private Messages," "Links," "Statistics," "Topics," plus a search box, a "Who's Online" block, and a login form with username and password[2].

Behind this shell there was almost no content, and the authors did not hide it: "So far just templates and nothing more. It will get better later," as the home page put it (in the original: "Пока только шаблоны и ничего больше" ["So far only templates and nothing else"])[2]. The only news item — "The Shakhunya site Magic Of Times has opened" — was posted by user root on Wednesday, November 19, at 21:04 MSK[2]. The main substantive element remained the poll "Should this site keep being made?" with the options "Yes, and as fast as possible!," "It wouldn't be a bad idea," "Whatever," and "No way — kill it at the root"[2].

Two snapshots taken ten weeks apart make it possible to gauge the site's traffic. On June 15, 2004, the poll counter showed 130 votes, and the single news item had been read 388 times[2]; on August 26 — 137 votes and 465 reads[3]. In other words, over two and a half months the poll gained seven votes. The total number of comments on the site is the same on both snapshots — three; the "Who's Online" line also matches: "Currently with you, 2 guest(s) and 0 registered user(s)"[2][3]. At the bottom of the page the engine dutifully printed its generation time: 0.261 seconds in June and 0.284 in August[2][3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was not a notable participant in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet. In the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004, the domain crb.shax.ru does not appear in a single line[5]; it likewise does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating — we have no data on its traffic.

The value of this address lies elsewhere. It is a rare trace of district healthcare on the internet of the early 2000s: it was not the regional capital but a central district hospital of a small town that set up its own web page, and it is dated 2001[1]. At the same time, it never got beyond "a little general information," and the domain itself was soon taken over by an unrelated amateur project — a fate typical of the era for a departmental site made once and maintained by no one.

How it closed

The last surviving snapshot of the site is dated August 26, 2004 — still the same unfilled "Virtual Shakhunya"[3]. In the web archive's inventory for 2005, the address is recorded no longer as an independent site but as a redirect to the unrelated domain p6.ru[4]. In all, only a handful of captures of the address survive in the archive, so there is nothing to judge the content of the hospital sections by: what remains of the Shakhunya CDH site is a stub for browsers without frames, the email address crb@shax.ru, and a list of keywords.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, August 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Inventory of crb.shax.ru snapshots in the web archive (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)