NaNo NoMore - Why I left NaNoWriMo!

Thank you for this video, I am not on tiktok and Twitter is very hard to navigate in any archival means and I was trying to find a video explaining what happened. Yours is the first I found that focused on what was found instead of just someone's feelings about it (without any details).

That's a shame. Anything involving minors is awful, and it sounds like it's going to drag down a community with it :(

this was actually the first time in 13 years that I decided not to do nanowrimo so I've been completely detached from anything coming out of it. I've been doing it since I was a teenager and it always felt so safe to me, even the in-person meetings. the idea that something like this could and was happening is disturbing to say the least :/ I hope the people affected are getting the help and support they need and it's shocking how little the nano moderation team cared about protecting minors.

I am still carrying on with NaNoWriMo this year, because I want to keep writing. This is the big month in the year I have a huge push for writing, so if I do things like delete accounts I will kill that momentum. But the thing is... while the news is a shock, it is not exactly a massive surprise. There has been a creeping shift over the years, and it is increasingly progressive. It has ended up shifting, and if you are more centrist or conservative, you end up feeling like you are treading on eggshells when interacting with people in physical write-ins. You also have 2020 and 2021 being entirely virtual, so they developed an environment where this problem could flourish all the more easily. Once this NaNoWriMo is done, I will have a think over what to do longer term. It is a situation that is likely to develop further, and probably not for the better. And if it ends up becoming headline news, it could potentially kill NaNoWriMo altogether. Thanks for making this video.

This is my first year doing NaNoWriMo, though I'm probably not going to hit the word count this time around. I didn't even know it was an organisation, but a thing you did for personal fun, like Talk Like A Pirate Day or some such. I may continue doing it for personal fun on going, but I'll never join the forums now. Thanks for letting me know.

NanoREEmo? It's NaNo RYE Mo, because it refers to National Novel WRITING Month. Clarity about issues raised and when the Board began to deal with them would have been more easily understood if you had simply stopped when you realized you were referring to the wrong MONTH. You made it sound like the Board had sat on the information for four months. Your explanation of mis-reading the date (American vs European) was still convoluted. Sometimes it's better to just stop and start over from the beginning.

They did send out a group email to the NaNo participants on 17 November, on the same topic but differing in content from the pinned forum post you read from. That's how I found out about this entire situation, because I haven't bothered with the forums for several years, and the NaNo groups I joined for information on physical write-ins haven't really been active since COVID. When I take part in NaNo, it's because I'm trying to write a novel; not find a new group of people to chat with. It sounds to me as though the Board of NaNo only became aware of this issue in November and that the material the individuals sent in, complaining about the moderator, probably went to staff members. That would also tend to explain why the staff were involved in only part of the board meeting (and why they have been required to submit written materials). While the allegations of exploitation are deeply troubling, it is likely not to be an endemic problem within NaNo as a whole, even if the allegations are later proven. In my personal opinion, it may be that one or more staff members may be disciplined (ranging from censure to loss of employment) if they, in fact, received and read the material in May and did not take it immediately to the Board (for whatever reason). However, I've seen nothing to suggest that the board members or executives of NaNo itself were complicit in any way with any wrongdoing and, so far as I'm aware, everything under discussion here is still only alleged and needs to be referred to as such, for legal reasons. It seems as though this all blew up about 2 weeks ago. I'm hoping for a speedy resolution and further email communication from the NaNo Board regarding the outcome, as I have neither the time nor the inclination to wade through the forums.