auto.kstovo.ru — the website of the "Express-Avto" car parts store in Kstovo, Nizhny Novgorod Region[2]. The earliest snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 28 August 2001[1], the last one 1 June 2023[6]. Of the snapshots examined, only the first one has any substance: in 2019 and 2022 the address served technical stubs[4][5], and the 2023 snapshot is unreadable[6].

The home page of 2001

The page was titled simply "Express-AVTO"[1]. Neither a product catalogue nor a price list is present in the saved text of the page, and the "News" section contained a single entry — "test"[1]: in August 2001 the site stood at its very beginning, in a state of trial rather than of operation.

Two elements common to home pages of that era did work, however — a poll and a visit counter. The poll asked: "What do you think of the 1C: Enterprise program?", offering the choices "so-so", "what a nasty thing!" and "a good program", and led through to the results[1]. The counter showed 1,450 visits in total and 299 on that page[1]. The only name on the page was the signature "(C) SupEr, 2001"[1].

The subject of the poll chimes with what the store claimed as its own merit in the directory description — the automation of stock accounting.

How the store described itself

What is known about "Express-Avto" itself comes from the nn.ru website directory: in the section "Firms (Enterprises) : Auto : Trade in spare parts, components, accessories" it was listed as the "Kstovo store 'Express-Avto'"[2]. The description, submitted to the directory on the store's behalf, called it "the largest car parts store in Kstovo" and claimed that it had been the first in Nizhny Novgorod Region to introduce one hundred per cent automation of sales accounting, goods ordering and stock availability[2]. The description went on to say that the store had been the first to introduce a form of pay for salespeople, but the sentence breaks off in mid-word — it is in this truncated state that the description has survived in the archive[2]. How that form of pay differed from the usual one cannot be learned from the surviving material.

Neither an address, nor a telephone number, nor a range of goods appears in the sources examined.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site has no measurable signs of prominence. In the directory, the rating column against "Express-Avto" read "none", whereas some of its neighbours in the section had numbers there[2]. This address does not occur in the archived rating lists of Counter.nn.ru on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based; nor is it among the sites that gathered votes at the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in 2004[3].

The site entered the census not through the rating but through the nn.ru directory — as one of the sites of district firms that registered their presence in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet before that presence acquired any content. The address was a third-level one, in the kstovo.ru zone.

How it closed

When the site stopped working cannot be established from the snapshots examined: the web archive index holds 44 records for this domain, but no copies of the home page between 2001 and 2019 have been read for this material. In the snapshot of 19 August 2019 the address returns the standard Plesk panel page with a message that hosting for this domain is not configured or that no such domain is registered in Plesk[4]. By 30 March 2022 that stub had been replaced by another one — "The domain has not been added to the panel", with a note that the site was served by REG.RU[5]. The last snapshot, of 1 June 2023, is unreadable: the archive saved a response from which no text can be extracted[6].

A domain probe carried out while preparing this census found a page headed "The domain is not linked to hosting": the address responds, but there is no site behind it. All that is left online of the "Express-Avto" store is one test page with a poll about 1C and a truncated directory description.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, section "Trade in spare parts, components, accessories", 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 2023 (archive)