I’m new to this forum, scribophile.com and nanowrimo. I just found out about the nano forums being suspended after some sort of allegations or scandal. I have had no contact with other humans since signing up at the nano website. I’ve joined a couple regional groups but they seem to be completely dead. Is nano no longer a valid means of connecting with other writers?
I don’t know, but it seems pretty serious.
I don’t know anything about the underlying issues, but NaNoWriMo’s Board released the following statement on the matter: NaNoWriMo
For the moment at least, their forum is closed.
I think a lot of local nano groups are continuing as independent entities. To find them, ask around at local bookshops and coffee shops. They may also have Facebook groups. Or their links from the nano site may still go somewhere useful. But yeah, Nano itself is going through some things at the moment.
I know this is nearly a year later, but the question is still relevant as nothing official has come from the NaNoWriMo org itself.
That said, it appears that the org is dying (if it isn’t already dead). The nonprofit organization itself is in default with the State of California (its HQ) for their nonprofit status. They got rid of their Municipal Liaisons—the volunteer regional coordinators—and when that happened, everything fell apart. The MLs were the main driving force for fundraising; last year, the organization did not even raise enough funds to stay in the black and many believe it’s a direct correlation to what the org did to the MLs.
As @kewms said, a lot of those (now former) MLs have kept things going within their regions, just not necessarily under the NaNoWriMo umbrella. I’m one of those former MLs for Denver (nearly 20 years as an ML), and I (and my former co-MLs) have decided to keep things going, and we are seriously considering branching off into our own nonprofit with the same mission the original NaNoWriMo org had (back when it was considered the Office of Letters and Light) as we believe in the original mission fully. We’ve actually dubbed ourselves “FauxNoWriMo” to kind of bridge the gap, though we will likely change our name if/when we pursue our own organization.
But at any rate, NaNoWriMo as an org appears to be crumbling into nothing, but the theme of it and the goals of it still live on. Thankfully, the organization doesn’t own the challenge of writing a novel in a month. 
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This has always fascinated me. Given how little the organisation is actually needed for the event, really providing only a sense of community, perhaps it is inevitable that some of the negative sides of culture protectionism creeps in and creates opportunities for the kind of things that went wrong to happen.
Switching the forum off was necessary, but without it… does NaNoWriMo really exist?
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The community aspect—both locally and through the forums—is truly what made NaNoWriMo what it was(/is?), so I agree that it questions the impact of NaNoWriMo.
One of the biggest impacts that NaNoWriMo has/had lies in their Young Writers Program. The curricula they made available for teachers (and most recently for homeschool programs) is what really gave them a solid place in the nonprofit sphere. The school curricula allowed for the choice of Common Core or Traditional from a creative writing standpoint for children ages 5-18 and I personally knew several teachers who used it every year. Getting the kids interested in this kind of creative writing was what really drove me and I was very involved with organizing kid write-ins at local libraries. My own daughter wrote her first “book” when she was 7 and kept with NaNoWriMo every year after that, eventually becoming a Municipal Liaison herself when she moved away for university. The loss of YWP is what really hit me hard.
The whole thing is just sad all around. I hope the org can come back in some way, but I’m not sure I see it happening any time soon, if at all. And that’s why my colleagues and I want to take up the mantle ourselves, even if it’s smaller and has a different name.
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I’d love to be CEO. I think there’s genuinely a great thing to be done there if they go down the right path. A quiet year (or two) for the main event with just a token presence where they focus on the charitable outreach aspects of the non-profit might actually be a good strategy for them to enable a reset.
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It is 31 March, there has been no announcement about the April Camp session, and there is no response on any official NaNoWriMo channels.
As a sponsor, does Literature and Latte know anything? Is this a planned hiatus, an oversight, or the end of the road?
They haven’t told us anything either.
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Are you not still sponsors? You are still listed on their site.
They have not approached us about a 2025 sponsorship (or anything else, for that matter). We have little control over what they put on their site.
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Fair enough. Looks like they’ve just given up.
And now we know…
RIP NaNoWriMo
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Although I never participated in NaNo (my project is long, absorbing, and ongoing so I could never fit within the time frame) I am very sorry to hear of its demise, and for the causes that brought it about. There is some excellent commentary on Reddit, from writers for whom it was a big part of shaping their artistic lives. RIP, indeed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nanowrimo/comments/1jog2tk/nanowrimo_officially_shutting_down/
Bummer. I thought it was just a really poor taste in April Fool’s joke. 
It’s a shame, but it sounds necessary at this point.
For a self-proclaimed marketing expert, Kilby Blades seems to have struggled to grasp the subtleties of market comms and engagement, and as an (also self-proclaimed) MBA, she seems not only to not understand what is and what isn’t revenue but to have only just discovered why Porter’s Five Forces are called “forces” and not “gentle influences”. Spoiler alert: it isn’t for the alliteration.
I say “self-proclaimed” because, hiding behind a pen name (a practice she notes without irony got them in trouble during the child grooming issue when moderators did the same thing), there is no way to verify her claims. She could be Bill Gates for all I know (except he’d know how loans work).
The mess that led to the close certainly looks to pre-date Kilby, but there is so much that could have been done at pretty much any point over the past five years to have avoided this if the team in charge had realised what they were there for. They still don’t seem to know.
RIP NaNoWriMo.org — you helped inspire a ridiculous number of people to write. Long live NaMoWriMo, you will be eternal while people still write books in November.
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Same, especially since as of yesterday it hadn’t been picked up by any news media, and was seemingly entirely confined to discussion groups (now it is everywhere). The home page is still up, but I noticed a few days ago that it’s fairly surface-deep. You quickly start running into 404s.
It is a real shame. I think it was 2001 or 2002 when I first tried to write a novel in November. While I never wrote anything I’d want anyone to see, I wouldn’t say nothing good came of it. The yearly “time out” for November became so ingrained in my psyche, that the month started to feel like the real New Years, even in terms of adopting new habits and all that. Even years after I had stopped doing it, there is still that reset dent in my brain, come November 1.
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In the email I got a few days ago (I particilpated every year since 2005, and donated almost every year too) said that they anticipated keeping the server up for a little while to let people download their user pages, lifetime word counts, and other data that might mean something to them, but warned that as more and more users tried to do this, that server issues would result. I took that to mean that they are in the process of scaling back expenditures and are no longer paying for scaling bandwidth, and that the 404’s are leading to places where the cull has begun.
If I were to make a guess, I’d say that the host will be nothing more than a “we are here” page by the end of the month, end of May on the outside.