lightnet.nnov.ru — the website of LightNet, a Nizhny Novgorod non-commercial computer network[1]. Its city affiliation is visible both from the domain in the nnov.ru zone and from the home page itself: it carried a block of links titled "Nizhny Novgorod home networks," and the network's chat ran on the server irc.nnov.ru[1]. In the directory of the nn.ru portal, which called itself a catalog of Nizhny Novgorod websites, the network was listed under "Projects: Computers and Software" with the description "The city's first non-commercial computer network"[2]. On the site homenets.nn.ru, which compiled Nizhny Novgorod home networks, LightNet appeared in the list of city networks alongside Yarmarka-net, Nestnet, Freelan, RealNet and Newnet[3]. In the web archive, the domain was captured from July 2001 to August 31, 2006; the analyzed snapshots of the home page date to 2003, 2005 and 2006.

What the site looked like

The header of the home page was built around an acronym decoding: the highlighted letters spelled out "Non-commercial Computer Network" [Некоммерческая Компьютерная Сеть][1]. Below the header was a menu of eight sections — welcome, news, map, faq, resources, photos, holidays, forum[1]. The same area carried links to neighboring Nizhny Novgorod home networks — Yarmarka Net and Freedom Lan[1].

The main text of the home page was not a list of services but a set of questions the site promised to answer: what the LightNet network was, why it was needed, why people who don't know each other should join into a network, why spend effort, nerves, time and money on this, why a computer without a connection to others was considered "dead hardware"[1]. The authors intended to answer in the first person — as the home page put it, to tell "who we are, how we live, what we know from our own experience"[1]. There are no rates, prices, address or phone number on the surviving home page[1].

Chat, forum and feedback

The home page invited visitors to communicate primarily through IRC chat. The 2003 snapshot lists the server irc.nnov.ru, three ports for different encodings — 6667 for CP1251, 6668 for transliteration, 6670 for KOI8-R — and the channel #lightnet[1]. By 2006 the server address had changed to its own, irc.lightnet.nnov.ru, with the same ports and the same channel[4]. Besides the chat, the home page also pointed to a forum and offered a way to write an email[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, the network was noticeable primarily through the directory. LightNet's entry stood in the "Projects: Computers and Software" section of the nn.ru directory between the e-Note electronic notebook and the "Kopeyka" Java-programs site, next to a library of algorithms and the freeware and shareware site Ant`s Soft[2]. The entry had no numerical rating: the rating column, like all other entries on this section page, read "none"[2]. The network does not appear in the analyzed tables of Counter.nn.ru, on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based. Nor does it appear in the voting results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day on December 16, 2004 — in none of the three categories: "Best Corporate Site," "Best Author's Site," "Most Useful Site"[5].

How it closed

The site's decline can be traced through its own update dates. The April 2003 snapshot states that the pages were last edited on November 9, 2002, and the sections edited were news and map[1]. By January 2005 the address no longer served the site's home page but the standard Apache web server test page — the one that, by its own text, is shown when the site administrator has changed the server configuration[6]. By August 2006 the old home page was accessible again, but the last-updated date on it had frozen at October 21, 2004[4]: the page had hung without a single edit for almost two years.

The last snapshot of the domain in the web archive is dated August 31, 2006. What became of the network itself cannot be determined from the surviving materials.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, section "Projects: Computers and Software", 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home Networks of Nizhny Novgorod, list of city networks, 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2006 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)