daizikov.narod.ru was a personal reference site about the computer game FIFA 2000, hosted on the free hosting service narod.ru and known from web-archive snapshots taken between 2001 and 2005[1][4]. The site entered Nizhny Novgorod circulation through the local ranking Counter.nn.ru: in the surviving 2000 snapshot of its table, it is listed under the "Projects" section as "Handy Tips for FIFA 2000" (Полезные советы по игре FIFA 2000)[5]. The page itself carried no address, phone number, or mention of the city or region: the only thing linking it to the Nizhny Novgorod internet was its listing in the counter[1].

What the home page offered

The home page was a short splash screen. Its document title held the placeholder word "основа" ("base") — a template stub the author never replaced, and it stayed there through the last snapshot[1][4]. The text consisted of a greeting to the visitor and two sentences about the content: as the home page put it, "На сайте вы найдете много советов и рекомендаций по FIFA 2000" ("The site has lots of tips and advice on FIFA 2000"), and it also promised programs and patches for the game[1].

The actual material was not on this page: entry was arranged through an advertisement. "Чтобы зайти на сайт, щелкните по первому же баннеру снизу" ("To enter the site, click the very first banner below"), the text read — meaning visitors were let through only via a banner block[1]. Below the message was a banner for the Ukrainian internet advertising center "ECHO"[1]. In the ranking table, the link pointed to the internal address http://daizikov.narod.ru/FIFA/htm[5]. Our set of snapshots preserves only the home page, so essentially only the entry point survives from the site: neither the tips nor the patches appear in any archived copy.

Five years without a single edit

The four surviving snapshots of the home page — March 31, 2001, April 11, 2003, June 6, 2004, and December 15, 2005 — match word for word, down to punctuation and typos[1][2][3][4]. In both 2001 and 2005, visitors were greeted by the same welcome message, the same description of the game FIFA 2000, and the same call to click the bottom banner. The page survived almost five years without an update — the ordinary fate of amateur projects on free hosting, which kept hanging on the web and in directories long after their authors had stopped maintaining them.

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the surviving snapshot of the Counter.nn.ru table, the site occupies row 72 of the "Projects" section: the counter column reads 611, and the rating column reads 4.87[5]. The directory description word for word repeated the title — "Handy Tips for FIFA 2000" (Полезные советы по игре FIFA 2000) — without a single additional word[5]. Its neighbors in the table were similar private pages on free hosting platforms mixed in with the sites of Nizhny Novgorod firms.

The published voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004 do not include the domain daizikov.narod.ru, even though quite a few narod.ru pages were among the nominees[6]. By the mid-2000s the site remained known only to the counter.

How it closed

The last web-archive snapshot of the home page is dated December 15, 2005[4]. No later copies are recorded in our materials, and there is no information about a move to another address. Today nothing loads at the address, and the only traces of the site left are the archived copies of the splash screen and its row in the ranking table.

On the environment in which such pages existed, and on the methodology for tracking them: Nizhny Novgorod Internet, Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru ranking, 2000 snapshot (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)