dzerzhinsk.ru — the domain of the city website of Dzerzhinsk, a satellite town of Nizhny Novgorod in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast: a directory-and-forum portal, the "Dzerzhinsk City Forum," billed with the description "conversation for every taste," listed in the Nizhny Novgorod directory nn.ru (the /rub/ section). In the surviving snapshots the site stated the city's population — "260,000 people" — and offered discussion, reference sections, and Group Purchase[2].

What the site looked like and what it offered

According to 2015 snapshots, the home page carried the name "Dzerzhinsk City Site" and a subheading giving the population figure — "population of Dzerzhinsk 260,000 people"[2][3]. The menu included "City Map," "Businesses on the Map," "Goods in Dzerzhinsk," "Reference," "Used Cars," "Communication," "Group Purchase," and a weather block with readings such as "+8 °C, north wind, 6 m/s, humidity 42%, pressure 767 mm"[2]. The forum section was divided into city topics ("The City and its Residents," "News Forum," "Complaints Book," "Communication and Dating, Flirting, Love, Sex," "Student Forum," "Politics," "Jobs") and thematic ones ("Sports City," "Tourism, Hunting, Fishing," "Auto Forum," "Esoteric Forum," "Computer Games," "Beer Forum," "Cafes and Restaurants," and others)[2]. The site ran a feed of local news — as the home page reported, headlines included "Minibus at a pedestrian crossing," "Hot water to be shut off in Dzerzhinsk," and "Eight Dzerzhinsk eleventh-graders score 100 on the state exam"[2][3], as well as a directory of the city's organizations and a function for finding people by name, school, or university[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod The Internet

The site was listed in the general Nizhny Novgorod directory nn.ru as the "Dzerzhinsk City Forum"[1], meaning it belonged to the same network of services as Counter.nn.ru and the forums of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet. In the surviving samples of the rating and voting for Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, no data for dzerzhinsk.ru is recorded — this means the sample lacks information, not that a confirmed zero result was recorded.

Early history and dissolution into the Nizhny Novgorod forum

The earliest surviving snapshot of the domain, from April 1, 2001, shows not a Dzerzhinsk site but a Nizhny Novgorod portal, "Nizhny Novgorod Online" — with a directory of "over 1,800 sites," sections "NN Digest," "Theater and Cinema Listings," "Exchange Rates," and links to counter.nn.ru, design.nn.ru, and forums[1]; the compilers of the census note that the copyright notice on this snapshot is dated 1999, and do not rule out that the domain name hosted different content at different times[1]. The last surviving snapshot, from January 13, 2019, records the address dzerzhinsk.ru already under the heading Nizhny Novgorod Region" — the general nn.ru forum section with weather and exchange rates for Nizhny Novgorod, where among the many topics is a thread "Group Purchase: Dzerzhinsk"[4]. The domain thus merged into the forum infrastructure of nn.ru; later snapshots no longer show a separate, independent "Dzerzhinsk City Site," and as of today the domain itself, as recorded in the census, is unregistered.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archived)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2015 (archived)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2015 (archived)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archived)