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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/TheNanoChronicles on 2024-01-29 19:54:56.
[Mods, added forum citations. Hopefully all is good now!]
Trigger warnings: child abuse, assault, predators, racism, fetishes, ableism, terrorism, bombings, and just plain abuse. This will also include brief mentions of religion.
Terms used in the Nanowrimo community:
Nanowrimo: national novel writing month: a writing challenge to write 50k words in November. This is also used to refer to the organisation, a Californian 501c3 that the challenge originates from, with a website and a forum. However the challenge can be done without the organisation. Often called ‘nano’ for short. Young Writers’ Program: a Nanowrimo run platform aimed at people under 18. A separate site with classrooms and its own separate forum. The forum is for people aged 13-18. Often called ‘YWP’ for short. Municipal Liasions: community organisers responsible for one region. This could be a city or a country depending on size and population. They help organise local events and mod their regional forums. Municipal Liasions are not paid. There are several hundreds of them. Often called ‘MLs’ for short. Christian Teens Together: a group on the main Nanowrimo forums, and the largest group on the forums. Despite the name the group is not entirely composed of Christians or teens, however that is where the group originates. The majority of the group are minors. Often called ‘CTT’ for short. Random Thoughts and Exclamations: the main thread of the YWP forums, basically a general. Often called ‘RTAE’ for short. Prior to the meltdown, Nanowrimo had around 15 salaried staff. These are collectively referred to as HQ. However, they also have several forum moderators. These receive a $100 check at the end of the year, but are mostly considered volunteers. These mods have no involvement in the main site. However, some staff that worked on the forums were salaried and had main site involvement and so will be considered part of HQ unless stated later on.
Scam sponsorships.
In December 2022, a group of Nanowrimo users raised concerns about a pair of vanity publishers that had sponsored the Nanowrimo challenge. (A vanity publisher or vanity press is a publisher where the author pays the costs and surrenders a large portion of the rights to their work.) Nanowrimo had promoted discounts for these publishers, Inkitt and Manuscripts, to winners of its challenge. Staff and mods suspended and muted multiple accounts who raised the initial concerns, but eventually allowed a forum thread discussing concerns to remain. One of the affected users explained the concerns as follows:
Now that I’ve been unbanned, I will try to keep the last 24 hours of thoughts…concise. Inkitt should NEVER have been accepted as a NaNoWriMo sponsor. They have changed business models every few years, and every business model has involved using up the first pub rights of any author who submits, WHICH IS A BIG DEAL, and promising them sketchy ‘prizes’ or ‘contracts’ in return. People who have given them a try also say that getting their content removed is a nightmare and they had to threaten legal action. These are just the starting points. There are blog posts about them from many authors dating back to at least 2016, including my own, that are easily discoverable by searching “Inkitt scam.” None of this should ever have happened. That said, it happened. And the mods panicked, and I went and wrote a whole new blog (which I will update soon to reflect NaNo’s better handling of things today) to warn people away from Inkitt because I wasn’t allowed to do so on the forums. And because I have some audience and writer friends, that got around, and Victoria Strauss got involved, and eventually we got here.
The following day, the Executive Director responded to the concerns with this message:
I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and feedback, and want to start with an apology that our vetting process hasn’t met the high values we place on our community care. It shouldn’t have come to this (like so many of you said), but now that it has, we’re taking it as a learning moment to improve our sponsorship processes and find ways to dig deeper into an evaluation of a company. We’ve also ended the sponsorship with Inkitt and Manuscripts. Currently, the vetting process involves talking to writers, editors, or those working in the writing/publishing “ecosystem,” and then interviewing the potential companies. We often have a long-term relationship with a company and work with them year-over-year, but as the writing/publishing landscape changes so dramatically every year, we often find out about new companies and reach out to them or they reach out to us. We will do a more thorough evaluation of these processes and policies as part of our 2023 planning process to see what changes we need to make. Our goal will be to ensure our policies are in line with our organizational values, and to make sure the process is more transparent. For example, we’re discussing how we can ensure that a wider range of community and trusted industry voices are heard in this process, and on that note, we have already asked Victoria Strauss from Writer Beware to act as a consultant. We’re really pleased that she’s generously agreed to this, as this is her area of expertise and her ethical standards are admirably high. Also, she’s been passionately committed to analyzing products and services for writers for so long. We’ll also be sure to consult the resources you’ve already named, such as the various forum threads where you all have been sharing your experiences with companies. Thank you again for raising your concerns. We take your feedback very seriously and center it in our plans to care for the community. I’m not just saying that—this has been a valuable learning moment to help us do a better job of vetting sponsors more thoroughly. Your voices are the most important thing we consider when making decisions—not sponsors, but you. I’m sorry that it hasn’t always felt like that in the past, and hope that we can make sure it does in the future. Like you, we think NaNoWriMo should be a place where writers can come for trusted resources. We’re disappointed in ourselves that we lost that trust, and we hope to regain it. I invite you to send on feedback at any time to .
While Inkitt and Manuscripts were removed as sponsors, it recently emerged that Inkitt was a major donor for Nanowrimo. Some users were beginning to feel that Nanowrimo was protecting their own interests over the interests of their users, which only got worse when new allegations came out the following year.
Inaction against predators.
In May 2023, a group of users raised allegations about a moderator of Christian Teens Together. The allegations were that this moderator was luring minors onto a fetish site they ran. The allegations were sent to the Executive Director and the Director of Programs, but no actions were taken after a month. An FBI report had already been filed, but the fetish site was being scrubbed, suggesting that the staff there had been tipped off after the allegations. The group built a new case and after public pressure, got the moderator removed for violations of the forum Code of Conduct after they started threatening the group and the Nanowrimo organisation offsite. This moderator could be a whole post on their own, and has used sockpuppet accounts to lurk on the forums and has commented on the situation on their tumblr. They are often referred to as Mod X, and will be referred to as such in this essay.
In June, a thread on moderation was opened, and a discussion began about the culture of CTT, where it became clear that Mod X had isolated the group and emotionally abused them. It was also revealed that the CTT had a ‘three strikes and shutdown’ system for a group with over a thousand members. One user explained the problem as follows:
How the CTT members were given only three strikes for over one thousand people is, frankly, appalling and obscene. I can understand treating them as a group; if you give them all three strikes, that’s over three thousand strikes. But they need more than three. But even with that, hanging that last strike over their head for over six months is unacceptable, and yes, I said it before and I’ll say it again, it is emotionally abusive to tell them that one more strike and they’re getting shut down for over six months. Never knowing who’s going to make the mistake that gets them shut down or when, and worrying about when someone messes up. Worrying that they’re going to be one that messes up and is blamed by the group. Terrified of reporting things because what if that report is the reason their community is shut down?
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ae3038/writing_discords_forums_and_a_decades_worth_of/