Forum.volga-tv.ru is the forum of the Nizhny Novgorod TV company "Volga", which operated under its own domain. The resource was listed in the nn.ru directory as a platform for "communication, discussion, polls"[1], and the earliest snapshot preserved in the web archive is dated February 2003, whereas the copyright notice on the forum page itself pointed at that moment to an earlier start of operation, 2001[1]. The last known snapshot of the site dates to May 2022.

What the forum looked like and what it offered

In February 2003 the forum ran on the phpBB 2.0.3 engine and consisted of eight sections: "News Service," "Original Programs," "World Cinema on TV Channel Volga," "Around Volga," "Complaints Book," "About Everything," "Technical Section," and "Test Forum"[1]. The moderators of the sections at that time were users Asya and Aleksey, and the platform itself reported 14 registered members and 381 posts left[1].

By April 2007 the forum had grown noticeably: sections appeared such as "The City We Live In," "Flirting, Love, Dating," "Music," "Sports," "Mobile Forum," "Techno Forum," "Games," as well as a themed section devoted to the esoteric TV program "For Those Whose Soul Does Not Sleep"[2]. Moderation by that time was handled by the user Irch — her name appears next to almost all the sections[2].

By 2016 forum.volga-tv.ru had turned into a full-fledged portal of the TV company: alongside the forum, the home page featured sections "About the TV Company," "News Service of TV Company Volga," "Programming Directorate," "Advertising Department," news categories under "The Whole World" (politics, incidents, sports, economy), a block of original programs, and an "Archive of Video" section with the VolgaTube service[3]. At that moment the home page was announcing a completed online conference with Sergey Naumov, acting minister of education of Nizhny Novgorod Region, on the topic "Stepping Confidently Into School" — as the home page reported[3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

According to Counter.nn.ru, as recorded in the census card, the forum of TV company "Volga" received a registered rating of 0.0, and no votes for it were recorded in our data — this means that in the surviving sample of the counter and the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting, no trace of the resource appears, not that actual traffic was truly zero. The site itself was nonetheless listed in the nn.ru directory[1]. More on the counting methodology — in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

By the mid-2010s the forum was serving an audience notable for a regional media outlet: the "Original Programs" section had 115 topics and 1,081 posts, the "Online Conferences" section — 23 topics and 658 posts, "News Service" — 42 topics and 196 posts[3].

How it closed

According to the census card, by the time of recording the domain forum.volga-tv.ru was no longer held by its previous owner — "no domain" — and the address, according to available data, ended up parked starting in 2022. This is confirmed by a web archive snapshot from March 30, 2022: instead of the TV company's portal and forum, it showed the standard nginx web server placeholder page "Welcome to nginx!" with no site content whatsoever[4]. The last snapshot recorded in the card dates to May 2022, which makes 2022 the year the site's content was finally lost.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)