oxota.mailru.com was a Nizhny Novgorod hunting website that ran on a free subdomain of the Mail.Ru portal; it was listed in the nn.ru directory as "Site for hunting enthusiasts in Nizhny Novgorod and the region"[1]. An early version of the site survives in the web archive with a snapshot from 26 August 2002; the last snapshot found dates to 31 October 2005[1][4].

What the site offered

According to the 2002 snapshot, the site was organized as a set of thematic sections accessible from the main menu. As the home page stated, "this section presents the most interesting photo materials", a separate section offered to "chat with like-minded people", and another was titled "review of weapons and hunting gear"[1]. A trading section was also planned: "virtual purchase and sale of new and used weapons", though the page itself noted that this section "is under development"[1]. The page was titled only technically — "Untitled Document" — meaning the author had not set a title of its own in the HTML[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was listed in the nn.ru directory, in its regional section (/rub/)[1]. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter the site does not appear — no data on its rating or vote count has been recorded in our data. This alone does not mean the counter was never installed: part of the history of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet has been reconstructed from incomplete samples; for more on the coverage and gaps see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

By May 2004 the content at oxota.mailru.com was no longer a hunting site: the snapshot from that date shows not a themed page but the home page of the Mail.Ru portal itself — with mail, a directory, exchange rates and a news feed[2], meaning the subdomain had stopped pointing to the author's content and began showing the host portal instead. By January 2005 the page at this address had turned into an English-language text listing product categories for price comparison — typical content of a domain-parking page[3]. The last snapshot found, from 31 October 2005, already shows a straightforward advertising page under a "MAILRU.COM" header, with ads for data recovery and the caption "Copyright © 2003-2005, DomainSpa, LLC" — meaning the domain was by then served by a third-party parking service[4]. According to the census data, the archive at one point recorded a redirect from this address to hotbox.ru, and as of the census date the domain oxota.mailru.com no longer exists.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, January 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)