Kempo (kempo.ru) was a website about combat sports and martial arts, counted as part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet on two grounds: it was registered in the catalogue of the Nizhny Novgorod portal nn.ru ("Catalogue — Nizhny Novgorod OnLine") and measured its traffic with the regional counter Counter.nn.ru under number 10184[1]. In the catalogue its entry was titled "Kempo — a portal. Everything about combat sports on the web"[2]. The web archive made its first snapshot of the home page on 3 August 2002[3], and the last one on 17 June 2021[4]. The site's own surviving pages carry no Nizhny Novgorod markers of their own — no address, no telephone number, no mention of the city or of a district: the only things tying it to the city are the entry in the local catalogue and the local counter.

How the site survives in snapshots

In the snapshot of 21 January 2012, kempo.ru is presented as "a social network for combat sports, religion" (that is how the page heading was laid out, complete with a grammatical agreement error)[5]. The top menu consisted of the sections "Posts", "Blogs", "People", "All tags" and "About the project…"; the stream of entries could be switched between "All", "Collective" and "Personal" and sorted by "TOP", "Good" and "New"; along the side ran a "Live feed" block with the latest comments[5]. The entries sat in the topical blogs "Sport", "Wushu", "Karate", "Psychology and Religion", "Films" and "Books", and in members' personal blogs signed with the nicknames Villi, Evg, caxap, Nadezhda, google, Rik, tubares, Kairondarkness. The topics of that period: kobudo, the 4 November fight between Denis Lebedev and James Toney, Fedor Emelianenko's defeat in the Strikeforce Grand Prix, a homemade wooden dummy for Wing Chun, the phenomenon of the lama Itigelov. Visitors were urged to register: "Every registered user automatically becomes a member of the Kempo community, and a great many interesting and useful things await them!"[5]. The top of that same page was taken up by PHP service messages with paths of the form /home/kempo/data/www/kempo.ru — at the moment of capture the engine was running with errors[5].

The snapshot of 2 September 2013 caught the site after a rebuild. An administrator's announcement dated 31 July 2012 read: "Today, 31 July 2012, the site Kempo.ru has moved to a new design and functionality. An enormous amount of work has been done on preserving the information that was there before"[6]. The menu had changed to "Topics", "Blogs", "People" and "Activity", and "Aikido", "Announcements" and "This is interesting, facts…" had been added to the earlier sections. The most recent comments in the "Live feed" reached 3 April 2013, and among the entries there were practical ones too: "Enrolling a group for Wing Chun classes (the Vietnamese school)", dated 31 March 2012 — with no city named[6]. By that time the tag cloud had been cluttered with extraneous words: next to "aikido" and "karate" stood android, samsung, pocketbook, opera, xperia[6].

In the snapshot of 2 July 2014 the combat sports had become thoroughly mixed with general entertainment content: "Koichi Tohei on Ueshiba", "The life of the Shaolin monks" and "The black samurai" sat side by side with "The Paranormal World", "Inexplicable, but a Fact" and a reprinted report of an incident in Usolsky District[7]. At the same time the opening of the BigTor torrent tracker was announced, with films and manuals on combat sports, sport, psychology and religion. In the footer stood the utility sections "About the site", "Contacts" and "Terms of use", an RSS subscription and links to Facebook, Twitter and "VKontakte", as well as the credits "© Powered by LiveStreet CMS", "Y9 — social network development" and "With the support of the site: Askee.ru — questions and answers" (spelling as in the original)[7].

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The nn.ru catalogue held two entries for the domain at once. The first — "Kempo", with a link to http://kempo.ru and the advertising description "An information and search portal. A huge choice of material!" — stood in several sections far removed from one another: "Portals and general-purpose servers"[1], "Sports projects"[8], "Art and culture"[9] and "Alternative treatment methods"[10]. Next to the name the catalogue displayed the site's standing in the counter.nn.ru rating — the figure was a link to the counter Counter.nn.ru/?10184. In the 2003 snapshots it stayed at around fifteen hundred: 1295 on 30 July[9], 1531 on 26 August[8], 1407 on 17 September[10], 1723 on 29 November[1].

What these numbers meant can be seen from the neighbours on the same "Portals" page in the snapshot of 29 November 2003: nn.ru itself stood at 17384, the Nizhny Novgorod business portal r52.ru at 7715, the news service nizhny.ru at 1472, and the "Ves Dzerzhinsk" (All of Dzerzhinsk) server, dzr.ru, at 824[1]. In other words, Kempo with its 1723 came in the middle of the list of city portals — more visible than the Dzerzhinsk server, but an order of magnitude below the region's leading portal. More on how this cross-section is put together is in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The second entry, "Kempo — a portal. Everything about combat sports on the web", with a link to www.kempo.ru and the description "Everything about sport and combat sports on the web. Theory and practice, a conference and a chat. Video and photographs", stood in the "Sport" section and had no rating at all — the field read "Rating: none"[2]. The site does not appear in the list of winners and nominees in the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[11].

How it ended

The latest entries to make it into the preserved snapshots of the home page are dated 2 July 2014[7]. What became of the project after that cannot be reconstructed from the available material: there is no dossier on the fate of the domain, and all that is known is that the last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 17 June 2021[4]. Of the community itself — the "Wushu" and "Aikido" blogs, the nicknames Villi, Evg and caxap, the homemade Wing Chun dummy — nothing has survived but the web archive's snapshots and two lines in a Nizhny Novgorod catalogue.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, the "Portals and general-purpose servers" section, 29 November 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, the "Sport" section, 29 November 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — First snapshot of the home page, 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the home page, 2021 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, the "Sports projects" section, 26 August 2003 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, the "Art and culture" section, 30 July 2003 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — nn.ru catalogue, the "Alternative treatment methods" section, 17 September 2003 (archive)
  11. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)