We have always maintained that the forums would reopen when they could be operated safely. Creating such conditions has been multi-step and multitiered. The fact that they remain closed can be attributed to a longer-than-expected list of systemic issues we've had to address en route to reopening with appropriate standards in place.
- Serious policy issues needed to be addressed. In 2023 and prior, spaces on NaNoWriMo.org were all-ages spaces. Any Wrimo of any age could openly search, friend, or privately interact with any other Wrimo in buddies spaces, group spaces, regional spaces, and on our forums. We've had to completely change our policy on all-ages spaces and build significant tech infrastructure to support those changes. That involved bifurcating our site into a 13-17 year old experience and a separate experience for Wrimos over 18. Policy and technology changes took six months and culminated in July 2024. We openly communicated about these changes throughout the year and provided extensive information to our community once they were released.
- Serious compliance issues needed to be addressed. Complaints about a forum moderator compromising child safety and previous staff misconduct on the forums in 2023 pointed to numerous compliance issues. Prior to December 2023, NaNoWriMo staff members had not undergone criminal background checks. NaNoWriMo volunteers (including forum moderators) had neither been background checked, nor put through a formal application process that required the use of their legal identities, nor received the state-mandated level of training required when interacting with minors. These large program gaps placed new leadership in a position to have to build proper volunteer infrastructure from scratch.
- Serious training issues needed to be addressed. NaNoWriMo staff had themselves not undergone training around working with minors nor had they been adequately trained around moderating large, complex, global communities. One of the two major complaints brought to the Board last year was the former staff's role in moderation problems. New training had to be written and developed from scratch. Even though we changed our policy on hosting all-ages spaces, we deemed both moderation training and community safety training as necessary. New staff and returning moderators need to be trained to spot unsafe people and unsafe interactions as our community makes this transition.
- Scope issues needed to be considered. Prior to the complaints received by the Board last November, previous NaNoWriMo staff was on the brink of permanently closing the forums on the grounds that they had become "expensive and unmoderatable". We conducted an internal study about forum usage and the holistic cost/benefit of maintaining them given that only a small percentage of Wrimos actually used them. We made (and announced) the decision to take a staged reopening of forum spaces beginning with 1) regional forums, then 2) forums for affinity groups, and culminating in 3) the full reopening of all-access forums only if the former two went well.
- Competing priorities had to be considered. In addition to community safety issues that were discovered through complaints to the Board in 2023, a full audit of operations showed us additional gaps in the way the organization was being run and problems in other areas of the organization with community safety. We deemed fixing community safety issues in our Young Writers Program, such as those related to educator account safety, as a higher priority than reopening the forums, and we let the former take precedent.
- Budget issues had to be considered. The greater context for all of this is that there were a number of problems within the organization that the Board found out about suddenly in November of 2023 and was placed in a position to immediately address. Though closing the forums at that time was an obvious necessity, many resources needed to expedite the process of bringing them back had not been budgeted-for. As an example, vetting (for the first time) a volunteer force of 800+ people, some of who donated their time to running the forums and moderating other social spaces, created unplanned expenses of >$150,000 that had not been budgeted for and that could not be immediately operationalized. Fundraising has been particularly difficult in the wake of community concerns raised in November 2023.
We understand that many are grieving the absence of the forums right now and simply want them back. It is important to the current Board and current leadership that we not repeat past mistakes. Community complaints about the forums and about the social dynamics within numerous NaNoWriMo spaces were significant, both in terms of the egregiousness of incidents that were reported and in terms of the volume of complaints that came through. We took those complaints seriously and have prioritized reopening the forums in a sustainable way over reopening them quickly. We hope that our community understands how seriously we take the organization, and our obligation to make our spaces safe spaces.