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We missed the start for April, but maybe we can whip something up for May? 
ONC concludes by the end of this month, too.
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You know what’s funny? I’m at work so my phone is muted. So I couldn’t hear the song and instead got to hear my coworker’s 80s pop ballad. It’s the funniest thing to see people in the audience jumping and rocking out to a sappy karaoke song.
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I’m for running a poll to test what type of event people are interested in.
Goals don’t always have to involve a word count (which was part of a problem with nano).
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I think wordcount is probably the best way of making it an “even” competition. As is, everyone is using the same metric. If I finish a novel in 52k words for instance, but you’ve set yourself a goal for 60k…apples and oranges.
That being said, whatever the community feels like doing is fine with me. I’m sure one or the other mod could check in occasionally if our help is needed, but y’all would have to run this for yourselves, because if there’s no community involvement, there’s not much we can do to convince you 
Feel free to brainstorm to your heart’s desire! I’ll be lurking
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Works for me! Whenever anyone else wants to do it is fine with me. (*＾-‘) 乃
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MayTheForceBeWithUs
Call it something related to The Force for Star Wars Day is in May?
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I’m not against it, but I’m also not a fan It wouldn’t be a Star Wars event. If I saw that floating around and didn’t know what it was, I prolly wouldn’t check it out because I’d assume it’s some Star Wars thing 
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Thoughts
I went to check my profile and saw that I joined in 2013, two days before April Camp NaNo, so it’s very strange for me to realize it’s almost exactly 12 years later that NaNo is falling. Well, the last year I did NaNo was 2023. Although not consecutively participating every year, I guess I’ve been on NaNo for 10 years.
Huh. Interesting.
Somehow it both feels like a long time ago, and also not a long time ago.
The scandal last year? Or was it two years ago? I feel like they were unable to recover from that. And then AI came in and pounded them down into the ground. I felt on IG that no one was really excited about November anymore. Some people were trying to start their own thing.
I feel like those of us who were involved in NaNo when it was at its best were lucky. The people who joined during or after the scandal were the unlucky ones who never got to experience NaNo in its true form of wonderfulness.
Look, this is my profile 
Look how many words. My background is from my 2020 Self-NaNo project where I kept setting 50k goals until I finished my four-book series.
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Ah fair enough. I was trying to make a pun 
hutnit failed
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Absolutely.
I did my first nano in 2019, my best nano, too (86k). It was amazing back then, partly because our ML was great and the group was great.
She stepped down later.
The group gave birth to a year-round critique group that we kept going on our own for a few years.
I took on ML role in our region in the unfortunate 2023 year.
After the scandal, they required MLs to jump through hoops, and I didn’t renew and so that was my very short ML career . No one did in 2024. Participation was low.
Looking back at it all now, there were lots of little disappointments compounding over time. While I had a great nano start, the event just kept getting worse every year. Everyone was trying to chug on despite it, but I think we all felt it.
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I felt that from around 2017, 2018 already, but since I wasn’t involved in groups, I didn’t feel like anything was really wrong with the site. I was always using it really minimally anyway and was fine as long it tracked my word count. I did feel the height of NaNo in 2019 though
I feel like a lot of things were at their height in 2019. Somehow everything in the world knew something was coming in 2020
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You’re right. Maybe it’s the shift in social media too. Fewer in-person events (none in 2020) could have been a big reason. For me at least, it felt like that was the whole point of nano. Otherwise, we have so many choices in online spaces. Their site couldn’t keep up. The community couldn’t keep up. It was chaos.
I feel like a big chunk of the disappointment is that we all held on to hope that it would get better but it went in the opposite direction.
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Yeah… I think so, too
Also, CampNaNo’s own website integrated with NaNo at some point, and then camps which people were still continuing after CampNaNo, just fizzled away. I think some people might have been continuing them as groups on NaNo, but it didn’t seem to last.
Not many people seemed to have been using the buddy system either.
In the video they said NaNo became a free for all, and it reminded me of those old niche online forums that were a big thing in the early 2000s (my mom was a part of a forum for foreigner moms living in Japan), but very few of them survived after the internet continued to grow, and the social media apps became a thing. I sometimes stumble upon old, niche online forums that haven’t been active since 2008.
The free for alls that slip past the early 2000s like NaNo, maybe just happened to be not as niche as to fizzle away, but niche enough (write 50k, meet-ups for writers) to sort of slip under the radar of all the regulations that websites need to uphold to these days.
They were big, but not regulated enough, and so, the scandal.
idk if I’m right about this stuff, but I do think a lot of the old niche online forums from the early 2000s aren’t as regulated as todays’ online forums. It was the wild internet back then. NaNoWriMo maybe thought they were fine and didn’t even bother to check if they should update themselves.
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You’re right on the money. They operated like a small group even though they were a worldwide event.
I loved the early 2000s discussion forums. That’s why I keep coming back here, it has the same feel.
People were nicer online back then. The cancel culture hadn’t been around yet.
Cyber bullying was at its infancy and limited to private messaging.
Nowadays, no one cares since they feel protected by web anonymity. Algorithms prefer hate and have trained us to jump on the slightest trigger.
I sure feel old thinking about this.
And I feel even more protective of this little bubble we have here.
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Nice profile. Here’s mine, for the memories :') 
How long it’s been part of our lives, and how sad that it’s no more. 
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I tried to use NaNo, but couldn’t get into it.
I just don’t like trying to crunch 50K within a single month and it was stressful. Though I do find doing your own version of NaNo to be better. Like the Rough Draft Challenge that Heart Breathings is doing and others too.
So, I guess RIP to NaNo and fans/supporters who remember the old days when there were less issues.
That is all I got to say.
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This little Wacky bubble is a great place to be, for sure.
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omg, your total word count is insane XD
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Hahaha yeah, I OA’d pretty much every year. One year hit the mil which really gave me a nice lifetime wc boost Fun memories
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