I think acknowledging that you probably couldn’t do much better makes you more… idk the word I want. Responsible, maybe. Kilby kept insisting she had all this experience running non-profits as she killed it and ruined the goodwill the community had left being a diva. Woof indeed.

In its heyday, it raised money to build libraries and was actually engaged in community outreach both for the NaNoWriMo program and writing/reading in general. And then they made a lot of bad choices and changed hands to people like the interim director who, yes, is incredibly out of touch.

Office of Letters and Light, rather. But yeah they changed the name to just NaNoWriMo and kind of lost the plot as far as the charitable side of it.

So pretty much back in the day, it was on track to be a writing and literacy-based non-profit that did a lot of its community outreach via its flagship program. It even used to be called The Office of Letter and Light when they first became a non-profit. And then they fell off. Hard.

The thing is, the org actually used to do charitable things as well. I took a look at the Wayback Machine to the site in 2005 when I first did it, and it talked about how that year they were raising money to building libraries in Africa.

Now? Not so much.

Honestly with how many articles are coming out about it today it’s not surprising it seems like the news came out today!

But yeah it was all a lot.

It actually happened last night, March 31st by their local time. So the timing is only unfortunate because news takes time to spread.

I mean going back to AI, ProWritingAid wasn’t even the worst; at least it was actually a writing tool. Did you see their other sponsor last year, the one that was nothing but a landing page and a logo that they sponsored NaNo? AI tech bro owned whatever the fuck it was supposed to be.

To be fair (lol not really) the mod who was accused of grooming was their resident Discourse expert so acknowledging the forum at all would mean they had to acknowledge she existed as anything more than a concept, and we can’t have that. /very heavy s

A lot of things happened. The AI debacle, but there was also a number of things about how they handled the underage members of the community (including an ongoing accusation that a mod in charge of them was grooming them). So yeah, it’s a mess.

This. Even accounting for that it was a local thing between friends at first, it ran for YEARS. I think the first year it opened to the public with a forum was 2002. Its format is a product of a different time. And honestly could have kept going if they didn’t nuke the trust out of the community.

youtu.be/TR6NnjgeIIY?... This is the video in question. Tl;dr it’s a bunch of the interim director blaming the community for not supporting and donating enough.

I’m a minimum wage service industry worker and I still did at least the ten dollar minimum to get the halo, and often got the program shirt for the year as well.

And yet they went from regularly getting multiple millions to capping at around $165k last year.

Gee I wonder what the problem is.

That is definitely the line that got me the most. So many of the people I knew through the program were low-income, on disability, or similar situations. They HAD no money to donate. While Miss Kilby Blades promoted fucking writer retreats in Italy.

A lot of mine are old enough to have holes in them and probably could have been tossed, anyway. Like on the one hand clothing for the needy is always good and it’s not like they’d be wearing something that said “H*il H*tl*r” but I still kind of don’t wanna put them out in the world.

If you haven’t already watched the video the interim director posted, she claims they rejected a bunch of other AI sponsorships that “could’ve kept them afloat.” Even if that were true, to what end? They’d already lost over 90% of their donations over the past few years.

Not screenshots, but someone posted the text of the email and a summary of the video here www.reddit.com/r/nanowrimo/... There are bits and pieces of screenshots floating around the #nanowrimo hashtag here.