11/12/2023

YWP forums are closed indefinitely as of 10PM Pacific . For updates about the NaNoWriMo forums or the YWP forums, you can follow the thread here (you just need a nanowrimo.org account in order to do so), or email the NaNoWriMo Board at nanowrimoboard@gmail.com. If you have a YWP tech support question or need, you can email ywp_help@nanowrimo.org. 

For those of you without a nanowrimo.org account, you can read the Board's first post here: 

To Our NaNoWriMo Community,

The Board wishes to explicitly and transparently respond to complaints that have come to our attention over the past five days. There is much to answer to, and our goal is to be clear and succinct in our responses. Since several issues have been raised, we will speak to individual issues on discrete threads. We don’t want to conflate multiple issues.

We’ll open this first thread by repeating some of the language we sent to those who emailed us directly. The first message we received was on 11/07/23. Since that date, we’ve received complaints from eleven community members. We responded to most with some version of the following:

First things first: we want to acknowledge the appropriateness of your concerns and your rightful desire to see community leaders take action. Advocating for standards that protect a community’s most vulnerable members is a noble pursuit. It shows how much you care about the safety of those connected to NaNoWriMo, and we are grateful that you have stepped forward. Thank you for raising your voice.

The Board did not have prior knowledge of the situations that have been brought to our attention. It’s not common for Boards to be involved in day-to-day operations. However, boards should always be available to field direct concerns. You are among the first to reach out to us directly on any matter since most of us have been on the board. We take your questions and demands seriously and we share your desire for community safety.

To recap Board activity since 11/7:

• The Board convened for 60 minutes on 11/8 to exclusively discuss the first two complaints we received (the only two that had reached us by that date; both were about said moderator and community safety)
• Prior to our meeting, we sent a list of questions to NaNoWriMo staff and spent part of the meeting hearing from staffers close to the matter
• We spent the other part of our meeting in executive session, discussing the matter without any NaNoWriMo staff present
• In the days since, we have fielded additional complaints on various issues and communicated via text, phone, email, GoogleMeet and GoogleDocs to discuss
• We received more than 120 pages of information to review as attachments from community members who reached out to us with complaints. We also received approximately 50 pages of requested information from NaNoWriMo Staff.

Based on the seriousness of the complaints, the volume of information the Board seeks to review, and the sharp increase in post volume in recent days, we have asked NaNoWriMo Staff to temporarily suspend the forums. This was a difficult decision, especially at a time of year when so many of our community members rely on the forums to engage with other writers. However, our priority must be to ensure that the forums can operate safely and to an appropriate standard of moderation. We feel that we must suspend the forums out of an abundance of caution.

Here’s what this suspension will look like:

• Board threads will remain active during the suspension period; other threads will shut down
• Board threads will be highly focused threads designed to address topics one-at-a-time. NaNoWriMo staff will not serve as moderators.
• Since the Board itself will moderate its own threads, we will close commenting for each topic response post after 24 hours. We want to allow responses and questions, to creating accountability and make space for community voices. But we also have to be realistic about the fact that the Board cannot moderate high-velocity message boards (we all have day jobs), let alone do so indefinitely. We are surfacing now to transparently share our responses and plans at this critical time, but we must make sure we remain in a position to spend time performing our intended role.
• A “Questions for the Board” thread will also be opened and maintained. Unlike the other threads, this one will be maintained indefinitely. Given the aforementioned issue (our day jobs), we ask for the community’s understanding in giving us time to answer questions.

For the time being, please bear with us. We will open this thread to questions but please be aware that we are trying hard to focus our efforts on giving answers about the issues folks have already alerted us to before we take on more. Two of us are traveling right now and we’re very aware that more of us will have odd schedules week-after-next due to the holiday.

We will open the “Questions for the Board” forum after Thanksgiving–after we have had a chance to issue initial responses to community member complaints. In the meantime, please post any urgent questions here.

In Partnership,

The NaNoWriMo Board

10/6/2023 update, posted in the Official Announcements forum:

Hello,

The YWP site, at its heart, is meant to support you all in writing - not forums posts, but novels and other types of creative projects. In the past, we even used to prohibit anything except writing-related posts in these forums. The highly social nature of these current forums, and the speed at which people use them (more like instant chat spaces, versus the slower forums of the past), in addition to our limited staff capacity, make them difficult to manage - especially as we move into the busy NaNoWriMo season.

Our number one priority is safety. In order to give ourselves the time to address a few safety concerns, we’re going to shut down these forums temporarily.

The forums will be closed just over one week from evening on Saturday, October 7 through Sunday, October 15. They'll re-open on Monday, October 16 at some point in the morning.

Here are a few alternatives we can suggest:

• If you’ve got a supportive community at home, then use this as an opportunity to disconnect from the online world.

• If you rely on an online support network, are there other ones you can participate in? Some of you are already connected in Discords or other social media. If you’re not already connected, then make a plan for how to do that. (Obligatory warning that you should be sure to keep yourself safe online. Don’t reveal personally identifying information. People are not always what they seem - keep that in mind as you interact and make friends. As YWP moderators we do our best to keep these forums safe, but any offsite interactions are out of our control, so please be careful if you decide to do this.)

• If you are 13 or older and have an account on nanowrimo.org, you can participate in the main NaNoWriMo forums. Here are the steps:

• Sign into nanowrimo.org.

• Click “Community” in the main navigation bar, then “The Forums.”

• Once you’re in the forums, you can request to join the teens-only group if you want. Go to the groups page, scroll down to the teens group, then request to join.

• The Codes of Conduct are the same on the NaNoWriMo forums as they are here, more or less. However, the forums function a little differently. Once you’re in the Teens forum, take a minute to read through Letitia’s “YWP Culture Shock” post, and feel free to ask questions in the Newbies guide thread, or read through the VERY detailed (and slightly overwhelming) “Welcome to the new forum. Now what?” guide.

Feel free to ask questions here or in MaM and we’ll answer them as long as they follow our Codes of Conduct, and avoid us sharing any personal details about other participants. 

5/5/2023 update:

The forums will be closed until Monday morning! Everything will be the same when you return, we’re just giving our mods the weekend off. Enjoy your time offline (on online in other places) and we’ll see you on Monday! 

12/24/2022 update:

The forums are now..... closed! We hope you enjoy your winter breaks. If you're thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, what the heck just happened???" then you may want to read the update we posted in the forums on 12/19/2022. Just scroll past all the dogs enjoying snow to get there.... 

Update posted in the forums on 12/19/2022:

Hello! In order to keep these forums safe, we (adult moderators) spend time each day reviewing flags, removing posts, checking in with participants, and trying to manage any fires that pop up (or better yet, preventing them from ever starting). Like many of you, the three of us (LJ, MB, and RD) will be going on holiday break soon, though, which means we won’t be around to moderate, which means….these forums will also be going on a break.

The Break will last nine days. The forums will be closed from Sunday, December 25 through Monday, January 2. They'll be open again on Tuesday, January 3.

(Pausing for people to panic.)

This was a tough decision to make. We know these forums provide support and community for so many of you, and that (especially if you have a difficult situation at home), the holidays can be really stressful. We also know that it’s not responsible (or legal) for us to keep these open without adult supervision. (For you old-timers, we never had the tools to do this in the past; now that we have tools to temporarily close the forums, we’re going to use them in order to prevent the kinds of flare-ups we used to see when mods were less available.)

Here are a few alternatives we can suggest:

• If you’ve got a supportive community at home, then use this as an opportunity to disconnect from the online world. Think of it as being stranded on a deserted island for 9 days - you’ll come back with a lot of stories!
  

• If you rely on an online support network, are there other ones you can participate in during The Break? Some of you are already connected in Discords or other social media. If you’re not already connected, then make a plan for how to do that. (Obligatory warning that you should be sure to keep yourself safe online. Don’t reveal personally identifying information. People are not always what they seem - keep that in mind as you interact and make friends. As YWP moderators we do our best to keep these forums safe, but any offsite interactions are out of our control, so please be careful if you decide to do this.)
  

• If you are 13 or older and have an account on nanowrimo.org, you can participate in the main NaNoWriMo forums. Here are the steps:
  

• Sign into nanowrimo.org.
  

• Click “Community” in the main navigation bar, then “The Forums.”
  

• Once you’re in the forums, you can request to join the teens-only group if you want. Go to the groups page, scroll down to the teens group, then request to join.
  

• The Codes of Conduct are the same on the NaNoWriMo forums as they are here, more or less. However, the forums function a little differently. Once you’re in the Teens forum, take a minute to read through Letitia’s “YWP Culture Shock” post, and feel free to ask questions in the Newbies guide thread, or read through the VERY detailed (and slightly overwhelming) “Welcome to the new forum. Now what?” guide.

Feel free to ask questions here or in MaM. Let us know if we can support in other ways until then (for example, helping to coordinate a “Break” party, similar to the “Wipe” ones???). The rest of the YWP site will remain open, so you’ll be able to work on your novels as much as you want. If anything breaks, you won't be able to use the Tech Help forum, so you can email our general customer service address: support@nanowrimo.zendesk.com. She won't be working over the holidays but she'll get to it when she comes back. You can also use MaM - we might check it a few times over the break if we have the time, but if we don't, we'll respond when we're back (and if we don't, feel free to message us again to remind us).