Chat.nn.ru (in its final years — NNchat) was a Nizhny Novgorod web chat that operated in the nn.ru domain zone. The nn.ru site directory described it in a single line: “Nizhny Novgorod city chat”[8], while the title of its own home page read “Nizhny Novgorod chat | Chat of Nizhny Novgorod”[2]. The first snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 15 January 2003[1], the last one 10 February 2016[7]. It was one of the places of conversation in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the 2000s and the early 2010s, put together on a ready-made chat script whose source code was handed out by an outside site[1].

What has survived of the chat

All known snapshots show not the chat itself but the page for logging into it. The chat ran on JavaScript, and the web archive robot, which crawled the site without executing scripts, ran every time into the service message “Your browser does not support JavaScript”, with an explanation that the browser most likely had a high security level set and that the settings ought to be restored[1][2]. In the snapshots from 2011 onwards one more line stands before this text — “Sorry, the chat cannot be used!” — and the page title begins with the words “Entering the chat...”[2][3][4].

Because of this, nothing survives of the chat itself: no list of rooms, no names of visitors, no rules of conduct. What the web archive preserved is the shell of the entrance, not the conversation.

The engine and the author's credit

In the earliest snapshot, of 15 January 2003, the page sent the visitor to an outside site for details: “To see a description of the chat or to download the source code, go to php.spb.ru/chat/”[1]. In the later snapshots this sentence is gone, but at the foot of the page there are the links “Download chat” and “php.spb.ru”, and beside them the name Dmitry Borodin[2][5]. Judging by these credits, chat.nn.ru was not an in-house development but a local installation of a chat script that its author distributed to anyone who wanted it; his name was still on the Nizhny Novgorod page in January 2016[6].

Change of name

In the snapshots of 2011, 2012 and 2013 the title of the home page read “Entering the chat... | Nizhny Novgorod chat | Chat of Nizhny Novgorod”[2][3][4]. In the snapshot of 7 February 2014 a shorter “Entering the chat... | NNchat” stands in its place[5], and under that name the site reached the snapshot of 7 January 2016[6]; the rest of the page text did not change by a single line.

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the nn.ru directory the chat was listed with the figure “Rating: 1800”; neighbouring entries in the same list had 935, 2 or “none” in the rating column[8]. What exactly this figure measured cannot be seen from the surviving pages of the directory. Chat.nn.ru does not appear in the available pages of the Counter.nn.ru rating: it entered the encyclopedia's selection through the nn.ru site directory, not through the rating. Summary data on Nizhny Novgorod sites of that period are gathered in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

Closure

According to the web archive index, the home page of chat.nn.ru was saved about eighty times — from 15 January 2003 to 10 February 2016; there are no later snapshots[7]. At the time of the encyclopedia's survey the domain chat.nn.ru does not exist: there is no site at it and no redirect to another address. Of thirteen years of the Nizhny Novgorod chat, a single entrance page remains in the web archive.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 7 January 2016 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the home page, 10 February 2016 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “New resources” section, 2003 (archive)