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NaNoWriMo<\/a>, a 25-year-old online writing community-turned-nonprofit, announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down.<\/p>\n NaNoWriMo \u2014 an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month \u2014 is an annual challenge for writers to complete a rough draft of a novel during the month of November. After starting as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, the project grew into a self-described \u201cinternet-famous<\/a>\u201d writing challenge with hundreds of thousands of participants over more than two decades.<\/p>\n The organization says it has had longstanding financial issues that have made it difficult to operate, but its other problems became more public last year. <\/p>\n NaNoWriMo lost significant community support when it took a stand in favor of the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing<\/a>.<\/p>\n New York Times bestselling authors Maureen Johnson<\/a> and Daniel Jos\u00e9 Older<\/a> resigned from the nonprofit\u2019s board in response, reflecting a growing concern among writers about how their work is being stolen<\/a> to train the very AI models that threaten their livelihoods.<\/p>\n Around the same time, the nonprofit was also lambasted for inconsistent moderation<\/a> on its all-ages forums, which created an unsafe environment for teenage writers, community members claimed.<\/p>\n According to NaNoWriMo, these controversies over content moderation and AI did not directly lead to the organization\u2019s demise. But they certainly didn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n \u201cTo blame NaNoWriMo\u2019s demise on the events of the last year does a disservice to all struggling nonprofits,\u201d a NaNoWriMo spokesperson, Kilby, stated<\/a> in a YouTube video. \u201cToo many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n