NaNoWriMo, a twenty-five-year-old online writing community that evolved into a nonprofit, has announced its shutdown on Monday evening.

NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, is an annual challenge that encourages writers to complete a novel draft during November. Originating as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, it grew into a prominent online writing challenge, garnering hundreds of thousands of participants over two decades and earning a reputation as “internet-famous” according to its own description.

The organization has been grappling with long-standing financial difficulties that have hindered its operations. However, its problems became more publicly apparent last year.

NaNoWriMo faced significant backlash from its community when it expressed support for the integration of artificial intelligence in creative writing.

Two New York Times bestselling authors, Maureen Johnson and Daniel José Older, resigned from the nonprofit’s board in response to this stance, reflecting the growing concerns among writers about the use of their work to train AI models that potentially threaten their livelihoods, as seen in the theft of their work for AI training.

Around the same time, NaNoWriMo was criticized for its handling of inconsistent moderation on its all-ages forums, which allegedly created an unsafe environment for teenage writers, as claimed by community members.

According to NaNoWriMo, the controversies surrounding content moderation and AI did not directly cause the organization’s shutdown. However, they certainly did not help alleviate its existing challenges.

A NaNoWriMo spokesperson, Kilby, addressed the situation in a YouTube video, stating, “To blame NaNoWriMo’s demise on the events of the last year does a disservice to all struggling nonprofits. Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free.”