hc-start.ru — the “Start Bandy Club Fan Site”, a site about the Nizhny Novgorod bandy team Start[1][2]. The first saved snapshot of the home page is dated 11 October 2004[1], the last one 18 January 2022, by which time the address returned nothing but the hosting provider's service placeholder[3]. Over those years the site changed its appearance completely: from a homemade page with championship tables to a news blog running on WordPress[2].

The 2004 site: the championship, the roster, the stands

The early version opened with the line “::: Start Bandy Club Fan Site - Nizhny Novgorod :::”[1]. The menu consisted of the sections “news”, “championship”, “team”, “Start-2”, “DYuSK” (the club's youth sports school), “history”, “archive”, “downloads” and “the stands”[1]. Separate lists carried links to the clubs of the championship's two zones — “All of the West” (Vodnik, Start, Rodina, Uralsky Trubnik, Raketa, Stroitel, Volga, Zorky, Lokomotiv, Sever, BSK) and “All of the East” (Kuzbass, Yenisei, SKA-Neftyanik, Sibskana, Sibselmash, Mayak, Sayany, Metallurg, SKA-Zabaikalets, SKA-Yekaterinburg)[1]. The third block was “All guestbooks”, a list of other teams' guestbooks, from Moscow's Dinamo to Sayany[1] — the site doubled as a navigator across the fan venues of other clubs.

The page itself held two league tables — “Team standings, West zone” and “East zone”, both still empty in October 2004[1], as well as a “Weather in Nizhny” block with a “Weather in other cities” link[1]. The news section reported that the first stage of the Russian Cup would be held in Syktyvkar and that on 13 October 2004 the first-stage matches would begin, with Stroitel, Rodina of Kirov, Start of Nizhny Novgorod, Uralsky Trubnik of Pervouralsk, Lokomotiv of Orenburg and Dinamo of Moscow taking part[1]. The schedule of the group two matches in Syktyvkar for 13–19 October 2004 was posted alongside it[1].

The team roster was published separately, with numbers, sporting titles and years of birth: number one was Honoured Master of Sports Vyacheslav Ryabov (born 1969), followed by Yuri Loginov (1967), Andrei Begunov (1967), Alexander Patyashin (1976), Dmitry Chekulaev (1975), Alexander Mikhalev (1973), Felix Tarasov (1969) and others[1]. Sporting titles were given beside every player as the abbreviations “z.m.s.”, “m.s.m.k.”, “m.s.” and “k.m.s.” — Honoured Master of Sports, Master of Sports of International Class, Master of Sports and Candidate Master of Sports[1].

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In our census the site is known from the 2004 lists of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day: in the vote it collected 143 votes[4]. No traffic figure for it survives in the summary of the Counter.nn.ru rating, so the contest votes remain the only measurable estimate of how prominent it was — for more on the method and on how this cross-section was assembled, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating and the survey of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

The second edition: a WordPress blog

By 2021 nothing was left of the earlier layout. The page title read HC-START.RU — Start Hockey Club (Nizhny Novgorod), the menu had shrunk to four items — “Home”, “History”, “Roster”, “Contacts” — and the foot of the page carried the line “The site runs on WordPress”[2]. The home page had turned into a feed of posts with a monthly calendar to the side and a search box[2].

All three posts in the snapshot of 20 October 2021 were published on 30 September 2021[2]. The first — “Ivanchikov saves a penalty from Mirgazov!” — was about a mini-tournament in Kemerovo involving two squads of the Russian national team and Kuzbass, in which the goal of the Russia-2 side was kept by Yuri Ivanchikov, goalkeeper of Nizhny Novgorod's Start[2]. The second described Start's trip by team bus to Ulyanovsk for two friendly matches against Rodina and Volga: the Nizhny Novgorod side lost the first game 5:10, the goals being credited to Dmitry Baranov, Alexei Kiselev (two), Sergei Dadanov and Vladimir Ivanov[2]. The third covered the second day of play in the Nizhny Novgorod mini-bandy championship, held on 26 September at the Yunost (Youth) sports and fitness centre on Yaroshenko Street, where players born in 2008–2009 took the field from eight in the morning[2].

These posts show what the site had become towards the end of its life: not a club's shop window but a chronicle of the season, reaching all the way down to youth tournaments at a district sports and fitness centre.

How it closed

The last snapshot of the home page is dated 18 January 2022, and the site's content is no longer on it: the address served a page of the hosting provider Hostland headed “The domain name is temporarily blocked”, with a list of possible reasons — arrears on the subscriber account, breach of the terms of use, load on the server, an unlinked domain, parking[3]. The promise “The site may be back up soon!” on the placeholder did not come true[3]: our web archive sample holds no substantive snapshots after that date, and the liveness check made while the census was being compiled found no working site at hc-start.ru.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2021 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote results, 2004 (archive)