hardnews.nn.ru (HardNews, styled by its own author as "Hard NeWs") was a Nizhny Novgorod website of private computer-hardware classified ads, operating in the nn.ru zone. Its home page introduced it as "Computer News of Nizhny Novgorod" and invited visitors to "privately sell, buy, or trade hardware"[1]. The footer carried the line "(c) 1999 OOO NN.RU" and the signature "WebMaster Alexei Bochkarev"[1]. Web-archive snapshots span the period from April 1, 2001 to September 9, 2005[1][2].

What the home page looked like

The page opened with the heading "Hard NeWs" and a set of slogans linked by ellipses: "Everything you were looking for... Everything you wanted to ask... Everything that could help you... And it's all right here!!!", followed below by "...your computer has landed on the right site...... remember that..."[1]. The menu consisted of six items: "home / offers for sale / wanted / trade / my prices / Nizhny Novgorod computer resources"[1]. In this way the site split its flea market into three boards — offers, wanted, and trade — while also keeping a separate page for the author's own price list and a directory of local computer resources. The home page also carried a mailing-list subscription form with "Subscribe" and "Unsubscribe" buttons[1].

The author explained the site's idea right on the front page, in a section titled "Instead of an introduction." As the home page put it, visitors were offered a "virtual analogue of the 'radio market'": instead of a trip to the market or to a shop where "prices bite," a person only needed to "offer their goods to potential buyers in an interesting and truthful way, or find among the goods on offer exactly what interests them"[1]. The text ended with an invitation: "Welcome to our 'virtual flea market' on HardNeWs!!!"[1]. The address was in the first person singular ("That's where I want to help you!", from the "my prices" menu item), meaning the project was a personal, not an editorial, undertaking[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

HardNews entered the Counter.nn.ru ratings directory, in the "Projects" section, as early as 2000, with the description "A proper computer site. Flea market, computer review of Nizhny Novgorod" (the directory's original spelling and wording preserved). The counter recorded no notable traffic for it, and the site never appeared near the top of the ranking; it is also not listed among the vote recipients at the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day[3]. This information is drawn from our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The site regarded as its competitor not other internet platforms but the offline Nizhny Novgorod "radio market" and computer shops: it was against these that the home page compared itself, promising the visitor that "you'd have to go to the market, and who wants that"[1]. HardNews itself, within the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, was a small private project on a third-level domain in the nn.ru zone — one of those run by a single person and lasting exactly as long as that person had time for it.

How it closed

Between the two surviving snapshots — from April 1, 2001 and September 9, 2005 — the text of the home page did not change by a single word: the same slogans, the same six-item menu, the same 1999 copyright line, and the same webmaster's signature[1][2]. That is a sign of an abandoned project: a flea market, which lives on fresh listings, had not changed even its introductory text in four and a half years.

The last web-archive snapshot of the site is dated September 9, 2005[2]. After that the address stopped responding: as of our survey, the domain hardnews.nn.ru does not exist and has no successor. Only the home page survives as readable text from the project; the listing boards themselves — "offers for sale," "wanted," "trade," "my prices" — are not present in our set of archived snapshots, so the contents of the Nizhny Novgorod "virtual flea market" remain unknown.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archived)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archived)
  3. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archived)