YTHT

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be updated.
Parts of this article or section have been identified as no longer being up to date.

Please update the article to reflect recent events, and remove this template when finished.

Yi Ta Hu Tu Bulletin Board System, or YTHT BBS, began on September 17, 1999, and was built by students in Peking University, Beijing, China.

It was shut down by the People's Republic of China government on September 13, 2004.

YTHT was set up by Lepton, a graduate student of physics in Peking University (PKU), on September 17, 1999, aimed mainly at the students of the university. It developed into one of the best and biggest BBS systems in the education network in China with more than 300,000 users, mainly students and well-educated professionals. This figure compares to some of the largest Internet forums in the United States.

On September 20, 1999, the login screen was changed to the one with a tower, a lake and the famous library of PKU, where the Yi Ta Hu Tu name came from. On March 24, 2000 the URL changed to ytht.net. In May 3, 2000, the first YTHT Committee was democratically elected by YTHT members, for the first time in China's history.

In the history of the development of YTHT, the spirit of freedom and democracy was a priority, although its popularity resulted in huge political pressure and YTHT was banned a few times.

On August 19, 2004, YTHT was required by the government to be in a status of emergency. Several boards on political topics were shut down.

Finally, on September 13, 2004, the Beijing Communication Administration shut down YTHT. At the same time, all the Internet forums in China were required by law to remove all discussion about YTHT. The words "ytht", "一塌糊涂", and "糊涂" are now blocked from Chinese ISPs. One of the major Chinese search engines also blocks these words.