Tianya Club, one of China's earliest and most influential online forums, recently announced it would resume access starting Monday, after having been offline for years.

Founded in 1999, the platform positioned itself as a space for Chinese netizens to create content and share knowledge. At its peak in the 2000s and early 2010s, it served as a major platform for public discourse, viral social topics, and the rise of online literature.

However, the rise of the mobile internet and its own operational struggles led to mounting access issues starting in 2022. The site was suspended on April 1, 2023, due to unpaid bills to a telecom data center, according to a statement released on Sunday by a joint working group for the new version of Tianya Club.

The iconic online forum will be accessible at its new web address, tianya.net, while the original tianya.cn remains unavailable, the statement said. Initially, only selected popular posts will be viewable, as data restoration is being carried out in phases. Full data recovery is expected by the end of June.

The joint working group emphasized that the forum's return is "by no means a simple retro revival, but an evolution for a new era."

"In an age dominated by algorithms, fragmented information, and shallow content, we need a spiritual home for genuine ideas," the statement said, adding that the forum's deep collection of original human-generated content will shine in the AI era.

The revamped platform will feature a new technical architecture and fresh page design, staying true to its original mission as an open, diverse, and inclusive space for in-depth content.

That said, many users reported on social media platforms that the new website was still unstable or inaccessible as of noon on Monday.