vyksa.info was a city website for Vyksa, a town in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. On its home page the site called itself an "Information and entertainment portal of Vyksa"[1], while the final table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day listed it as "Information portal of the city of Vyksa"[3] — and it was under that name that it entered our census. The earliest snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated 6 April 2004[1]. According to the census data, the domain was active from 2004 to 2023, and has been listed for sale since 2024[2].

The 2004 home page

The only surviving substantive snapshot dates to 6 April 2004. The home page was assembled from blocks typical of the time: a strip of banners, its own mail service marked "For registered users only," a site search, and a calendar line with upcoming holidays — for 7 April the portal reminded readers of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos and World Health Day[1]. In its meta description the site called itself "The city of Vyksa. Information portal," and among its keywords listed what it promised the reader: catalog, search, directory, map, phone, transport, forum, chat, news, dating[1].

Most of the page was taken up by the "City News" feed — short items dated in the format "4.04.04"; the snapshot shows five items[1]. From 4 April, an item about an evening on 2 April at the Lenin House of Culture, where "Shadows" and "Demon of Power" were shown: zombies wandered the halls, loud music played, and the item's author compared what he saw to a death-metal show. From 24 March, "Terrible crash near the village of Rizadeyevsky": at 0:40 the driver of a Lada "Nine" lost control and struck a tree at high speed; seven people aged 17 to 21 were in the car, three died on the spot, three more were severely injured, and the driver escaped with bruises. Dated the same day was the item "From Vyksa to Moscow by the new highway" — a reprint of a publication from the newspaper "VR" of 22 January 2004 about the opening of the Ryazan road, with a route breakdown: 75 kilometers to Voznesenskoye, then a fork at the entrance and a right turn toward Tengushevo. From 15 March, a report on the elections that had taken place, in which the portal recalled fears that turnout in the district would fall because of poor road quality, and an item that Alexander Naumovich Mitta — described on the site as the director of "The Border" and "The Crew" — was coming to town to choose filming locations for a fourteen-part film.

"Vyksa-info" and the "Vyksa in Smiles" contest

Behind the portal stood the "Vyksa-info information center" — so it is named in an item from 1 April 2004 about the results of the "Vyksa in Smiles" contest[1]. The portal announced the contest for city jokes, tall tales, and funny stories on 12 February; the grand prize was a mobile phone, other participants were promised consolation prizes, and the editors promised to publish submissions in the "Just for Laughs" section[1]. Stories were accepted both by email and by regular mail to the editors' post-office box; as the home page reported, both were overflowing with submissions[1]. The contest was announced by "our portal," meaning the site and "Vyksa-info" acted as one. A telling detail: the district site had not only a news output but also an incoming stream from readers, arriving both by email and by regular mail to the editors' box.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet

In our census, which grew out of an Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, vyksa.info entered not through Counter.nn.ru — it has no traffic figures in the collected counter data — but by way of the voting results of the 2004 Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet[3]. The site competed in the "Most Useful Site" category and took 12th place out of 47 entrants: 29 votes cast by email and 4 by SMS[3].

The first eleven lines of the category were taken by sites from the regional capital — from the Nizhny Novgorod car forum (212 votes by email and 36 by SMS) down to ALLO.NNOV.RU (39 and 0). Against that background vyksa.info turned out to be the best among the district-town sites: the Bor City Internet Portal got 15 and 1, the Bogorodsk City Forum got 5 and 1, and "All of Dzerzhinsk (dzr.ru)" got 1 and 0[3]. The very fact that a district portal made the final table meant it had been noticed beyond its own town: the contest covered the entire Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

No later substantive snapshots of the home page survive in the web archive: a request to the domain on 2 February 2023 returned neither a heading nor any text from the portal. The last snapshot, from 1 March 2024, shows no longer a portal but a page of the Dan.com marketplace with the notice "The domain name vyksa.info is for sale" at a price of 100 US dollars[2]. At the time this census was compiled, the domain was unregistered.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Domain sale page, 2024 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)