gay-nn.ru (“Nizhny Novgorod Gay Site”) was a Nizhny Novgorod website for a gay audience that operated in the first half of the 2000s. It was listed in the directory of the nn.ru portal, which called itself “a catalogue of Nizhny Novgorod websites”[1], and was registered with the regional counter Counter.nn.ru under number 3016[1]. We were unable to find any snapshots of the site itself in the web archive: all the surviving snapshots of the home page at this address already belong to the next owner of the domain[7]. Everything that is known about the site has been reconstructed from the listing pages of the Nizhny Novgorod directory of 2002–2004.

What the catalogue reported about the site

The annotation in the directory did not change from snapshot to snapshot between April 2002 and January 2004 and read as follows: “A Nizhny Novgorod gay site for people of ‘non-standard’ orientation. About the city, dating, chat, links...”[1][5]. From it the composition of the sections can be pieced together: city information, dating, chat and a selection of links. There is no more detailed description in the materials available to us.

The site was listed in the catalogue in two rubrics at once: “Projects : Entertainment and Recreation : Communication”[1] and “Projects : Entertainment and Recreation : Sex, Erotica, Leisure”[2]. In the first, its neighbours on the list were “ChatOk`s Gallery”, “News Discussion Forum” and “First Dzerzhinsk Forum”[1]; in the second, “Sex-NN, a site about sex in Nizhny Novgorod” and “Gay Nizhny Novgorod”, a separate site on the same subject hosted on narod.ru[2].

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The only measurable value left from the site is its score in the Counter.nn.ru rating, which the directory printed next to every line of the catalogue. Across the snapshots it changed as follows: 386.17 on 25 April 2002[1], 28.1 on 22 May 2002[2], 346 on 18 November 2002[3], 1773 on 17 September 2003[4], 497 on 13 January 2004[5]. With the highest of these values, 1773, the site entered our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

In the autumn of 2002 the site made it into the “The Very Best” section of the directory, where nn.ru showed the resources “that visitors of the directory click through to most often according to the data for the last 30 days”[3]. In the snapshot of 18 November 2002 it occupied 84th place with 188 click-throughs for the month and stood between “Nizhny Novgorod Recruitment Agencies” (189 click-throughs) and the Nizhny Novgorod business portal R52 (184 click-throughs)[3] — that is, in the city-wide list of click-throughs it ran on a par with business and reference sites.

The site does not appear in the published voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004[9].

How it closed and what became of the domain

The exact date of closure cannot be established from our materials: the last catalogue mention of the site dates to 13 January 2004[5]. By the beginning of the 2010s the domain was already occupied by an unrelated project. In the snapshot of 14 January 2012, gay-nn.ru hosted the Brand Boutique clothing store with the sections “About Us”, “Placing an Order”, “Payment”, “Delivery”, “Exchange/Return”, “What are supercopies?”, a catalogue made up of the rubrics “Sale”, “Men’s Clothing”, “Women’s Clothing”, “Children’s”, “Bags”, “Watches”, “Accessories” and the poll “Which clothing brands do you prefer?”[7]. At the bottom of the page stood the line “© Brand Boutique. Runs on the WebAsyst Shop-Script online store script”[7]. There is no address, no telephone number and no other Nizhny Novgorod trace on this page.

The snapshot of 28 December 2013 repeats the same page almost word for word, but a line “Industrial refrigeration equipment in the Voronezh Region” appeared in the catalogue menu[8], connected neither with the clothing store nor with Nizhny Novgorod. The last record of the domain in the web archive is dated 24 January 2022[6]; by the time of our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating the domain gay-nn.ru was not registered.

The site was gone before the domain was: of this piece of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s there remain only a line in a catalogue, a single sentence of description and five figures from a counter.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Communication” rubric, 25 April 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Sex, Erotica, Leisure” rubric, 22 May 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “The Very Best” section, 18 November 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Communication” rubric, 17 September 2003 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Sex, Erotica, Leisure” rubric, 13 January 2004 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — List of gay-nn.ru snapshots in the web archive (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)