rf-slf.nino.ru was the site of Radiofak (Radiophysics Faculty) alumni at Gorky/Nizhny Novgorod State University, listed on the network under the name RF-SLF[5], and in the Nizhny Novgorod directory as "the Page of the RADIOFAK of GGU"[6]. The domain's documented life spans seven years: by December 2, 2000 the site already stood in the overall ranking of the Nizhny Novgorod counter Counter.nn.ru[5], and the web archive took its last copy of the home page on December 24, 2007[4]. The nn.ru directory placed the site among personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents and described it in one line: "A place for virtual reunions of Radiofak GGU alumni"[6]. Everything else was behind a password.

A door with the password written on it

Copies of the home page from February 15, 2001[1], April 23, 2003[2], September 19, 2004[3] and December 24, 2007[4] show the same thing, word for word. The saved text has no menu, no sections, no address, no phone number: a short informal greeting telling the visitor they had "landed on the site of RF GGU alumni," a "Password:" field — and that is all[1]. Insiders were expected to do what they already knew; outsiders were meant to move on.

The lock, though, was a formality. The very first line of the page — doubling as the window title — carried the English hint "For woodpeckers: password is 'RF-SLF' or 'РФ-СЛФ'" (literally, "for woodpeckers"), which immediately gave away the password: RF-SLF, or, typed on the same keys in the Russian layout, RF-SLF[1]. The same line with the same password appears in the December 2007 snapshot as well[4]: across the seven years visible in the surviving copies, the door was never redone. The password simply repeated the domain name, so the entry served more as a sign "for our own people" than as real protection.

What lay behind that door cannot be seen from the archival material: the login screen is all that survives of the site in the copies. Its content can be judged only by the directory's one-line description of "virtual reunions of alumni"[6].

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod The Internet

Being closed off did not keep the site from being noticed. On December 2, 2000, RF-SLF held seventh place in the overall ranking of counter.nn.ru — the counter used at the time to measure the Nizhny Novgorod Internet. Its "Counter" column read 21665, its "Rating" column 833.27, and its "Hits" column 351[5]. Its neighbors in the same table show the scale involved: fourth place went to the Nizhny Novgorod Telegraph Agency, fifth to "Nizhny Novgorod OnLine," the city's central server[5]. The page of a single faculty's alumni — the very one whose home page, two and a half months later, would turn out to be nothing but a bare password form[1] — held its own in the top ten alongside a news agency and a city portal.

In the nn.ru directory the site sat in the branch "Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents" → "Personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents" → "Pages about the author." On June 20, 2002 it stood ninth of 134 sites in that category, with a rating of 86[6]. On November 28, 2003 it was ninth again, now out of 145, with a rating of 96[7]. Its registration number in the counter did not change across these years: in the 2000 table and in the 2002 and 2003 directory entries alike it is the same — 1326[5][6][7]. In other words, the counter was installed once and kept running at that address for all those years.

How it disappeared

The last archival copy is dated December 24, 2007, and it is still the same password entry form[4]. Beyond that, there is no trace: a check made while preparing the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating no longer found the rf-slf.nino.ru domain. Whether the alumni community moved somewhere else cannot be said from the available material.

Of a site that held its place in Nizhny Novgorod rankings for seven years, one page of a few lines survives — the one turned toward outsiders. Everything the site existed for stayed on the other side of the password.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Overall ranking, counter.nn.ru, snapshot December 2, 2000 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents section, snapshot June 20, 2002 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, personal pages of Nizhny Novgorod residents section, snapshot November 28, 2003 (archive)