On December 11, Cyberdom, also known as Cyber House, hosted an award ceremony for the winners of the annual Heroes of the Runet award. Awarded for the second time, this prize is designed to honor projects, people and initiatives which had a major bearing on shaping the Russian segment of the internet in 2024 in terms of their social role and achievements. ROCIT, the oldest public institution within the Russian internet segment, established this award.
“The Heroes of the Runet award can be described as a research initiative with an entertaining twist. ROCIT has a solid track record for producing solid research. As you know, we don’t have any award categories for research. That said, we have been relying on ROCIT’s expertise and the views we share within our community regarding the Heroes of the Runet,” Anton Gorelkin, Chairman of the ROCIT Board, Deputy Chair of the State Duma Committee on the Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, said. “We tried to highlight what happened within the Russian segment of the internet in 2024. This time, we held a popular online vote for the first time and received over 2,000 submissions. I would like to thank Runet users who contributed to selecting our contenders. It is my hope that our award, which is also a research initiative, comes to symbolize excellence and sets a high standard,” he went on to say.
Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ was the award’s general partner. It established the category titled Promoting the Cyrillic Alphabet Online. Ispmanager, one of the first companies to offer Cyrillic domain and email support in the control panel of online services and websites, received the prize in this category. Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Director Andrey Vorobyev, together with Coordination Center’s Senior Analyst and Head of Поддерживаю.РФ project Maria Kolesnikova presented the prize, a statuette, to Ispmanager’s Director General Fyodor Bogomolov.
“For Ispmanager, this award is a recognition of the achievements by its developers in terms of promoting universal acceptance: today, users who operate Cyrillic domains can use email hosting services offering Cyrillic support without any restrictions, including hosting services relying on ispmanager, and can better serve their customers this way. We are delighted to note that there are software development companies eager to respond to what the users want and need and ready to promptly improve and fine-tune their products and solutions to meet these expectations. We believe that the effort to fine-tune ispmanager was timely considering the growing demand for registering Cyrillic domains in the .РФ zone and the legislative requirements to use email addresses within the Russian domains. This offers a great example for other developers working on Russian software,” Andrey Vorobyev pointed out.
The .РФ Cyrillic domain will mark its 15th anniversary in 2025. Today, it includes almost 800,000 unique Russian-language domain names and is the world’s largest Cyrillic domain. Universal acceptance, i.e., a framework ensuring that all online products and services can work with both Latin, as well as internationalized domain names and email addresses has been on the agenda since the first internationalized domains were created. One of the core missions for the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ consists of creating and developing an ecosystem for supporting domain names and email addresses in national languages, primarily in the .РФ Cyrillic TLD. It is for this purpose that the Coordination Center established the Поддерживаю.РФ project five years ago as a way to support and offer guidance to software developers, email providers and hosting providers willing to contribute to ensuring universal acceptance.
