Shuimu Tsinghua (Chinese: 水木清华; pinyin: shuǐmù qīnghuá; abbreviated as SMTH) BBS is the first and one of the most popular bulletin board system sites among the universities in China.
[1] Access to the SMTH BBS was restricted to on-campus IPs since March 16, 2005, effectively blocking away a substantial portion of its contributors, ranging from graduates living overseas to students from other universities in China.
Early in 2006, the SMTH BBS reopened itself to the alien IPs from outside Tsinghua University, available to those who would confirm their identification using a valid email account.
On August 8, the BBS formally declared open, and was named "Shui Mu Tsing Hua", often abbreviated as SMTH, which in Chinese means "Water is clear, with trees in florescence", referring to a line in an ancient poem and an actual site in Tsinghua University.
Between March and April, the SMTH community organized a kite-flying party and received a large publicity nationwide as CCTV (China Central Television) recorded and aired the event in its Our Generation program.
The following month, SMTH closed its Military, History, Salon and Time-Space Report discussion groups.
In December, SMTH experienced a severe hard drive breakdown, resulting in the loss of two months worth of information.
The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China issued a mandate in 2005, demanding all university BBS sites to be reformed into campus-wide communication platforms and requiring users to register under their legal names.
"The history of SMTH in the past decade has shown that, with a friendly community atmosphere, good academic discussion, development of informational sections and effective, strict internal site management, users outside the campus are not the cause of mismanagement, nor the source of various destabilizing elements.
On the contrary, a fully open, strictly managed off-campus user community has proven to be instrumental to SMTH's vigor and quality, and hence contributes in a tremendous way to the upholding of the academic reputation of the University."
March 16, after a brief recovery of service, Lily, the BBS of Nanjing University,百合, became "read only", depriving all users of their posting privileges.
They produced large amount of screenshots of previous greeting messages of SMTH to express their condolences, hope or criticism.
On March 8, 2005, the Network Research Center of Tsinghua University (NRCOTU) urged the SMTH BBS administration to block THUExpress, one of the SMTH's most visited and prosperous discussion group, from access by alien IPs from outside campus, and indicated that it was due to a pressure from the Ministry of Education.
On the afternoon of March 16, the NRCOTU put the machine that runs SMTH under its tight control, blocking all alien IPs outside of campus, and rewrote the telnet log-in welcome message as "From today onward, SMTH BBS has re-established itself as a campus-only site as opposed to its former publicity and offers only limited access for alien IPs."
On the morning of April 14, Chen Maoke, along with some guys from the NRCOTU, broke into the room that hosted the SMTH machine, from which they removed the cables connecting the data hard drive stand causing a breakdown of service.
And its Web features, the original work by the SMTH BBS developing team, was announced to have been under a non-GPLed, private license.