roja.ru is a domain that was listed in the nn.ru directory of internet resources under the entry "Yobkhanga — fan club of the band Pilot" with the description "Unofficial website of the city of Dzerzhinsk. Music, games, entertainment, unusual software, screensavers, weather, news"[1]. The name and description from the directory do not match what the surviving snapshots of the home page show: there, roja.ru is not a website of Dzerzhinsk or a fan page of the band "Pilot", but an entertainment portal with flash games and humor. The earliest web archive snapshot is dated August 2001, and the last snapshot with substantive content dates from 2013[2].

What the site looked like

The first surviving snapshot, from 2001, captures an "Under constraction!" placeholder — the site on the domain had not yet been launched[3]. By 2007 roja.ru hosted an entertainment portal with sections "Flash Games", "Flash Cartoons", "Photo Jokes", "Jokes" and "Dating"[1]. According to the home page, the site offered a "Rating of flash cartoons and games" with visitor voting and leaderboards — for example, the cartoon "The Singing Little Horses" and the game "AntCity" topped their respective ratings at the time of the snapshot[1]. The link catalog was divided into categories: flash cartoons had subsections such as "Action", "Parodies", "Humorous", "Cruel Jokes" and others, while jokes were divided into "Georgians", "Chukchi", "Army", "About Jews", "Doctors" and a number of others, each with the number of texts indicated[1]. The site offered visitors free email at addresses of the form "@roja.ru" and was integrated with the LoveFree.ru dating service, whose form stood right on the home page[1]. At the bottom of the page, as was customary for sites of that era, there were banner exchanges and partner text links — for metal doors, air conditioners and furniture[1]. The page also kept a daily activity counter: "Cartoons watched 163 times, Played: 102 times, Voted: 2 times"[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The domain roja.ru was listed in the nn.ru directory[1], but no votes for it or rating data from Counter.nn.ru, nor results from the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, are recorded in the surviving samples for this domain. The discrepancy in content between the directory entry ("unofficial website of the city of Dzerzhinsk", music, weather, news) and the site's actual content (flash entertainment, jokes, dating) is not explained in the material — it is likely that the directory entry referred to an earlier or different version of the project on this domain, or was changed later without updating the description.

How it closed

By mid-2013 the site on the domain was no longer responding: an archive snapshot captures the standard page of the hosting provider Infobox.ru, "Cannot find site on server srv009.infobox.ru" — a message stating that no site by that name was found on the server[2]. By 2023 the domain hosted a typical parking page from the registrar RU-CENTER offering to register the domain or buy it at auction[4]. According to available data, the domain has been vacant since 2024; it cannot be ruled out that it was later occupied by another owner unrelated to the site's former content.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2013 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2023 (archive)