Cabin

A Cabin is an optional social feature exclusive to Camp NaNoWriMo.

A Camp Cabin is a private forum, accessible only to the particular members of the cabin. The center of the page hosts a message board which holds messages up to 250 characters apiece, displayed in reverse order with a timestamp (prior to April 2013, the timestamp displayed only the date.) To the side of the message board, it displays the name and avatar of each member, along with their novel title. For April 2013's Camp, each member's wordcount goal and progress was added as well. Camp Cabins also have a separate chart and combined word goal on the Stats page.

Cabins originally consisted of four to six members. The number of members was increased to eight for July 2013's Camp and increased to twelve for Camp 2014, where it remained for 2015. Cabins assignments are assigned starting about a week before the actual event and then once a day. The algorithm considers requests for other Campers writing in the same genre (with Erotica-sorted cabins disallowing participants under 18), aiming for a similar goal, or in the same age range. The algorithm was significantly tweaked in 2013 based on feedback from the Camp participants. By the 2014 camp sessions, participants could also request cabins by activity level or request specific Wrimos.

The July 2014 Camp session introduced private cabins, an easier way to request specific campers [1]. Private cabins replaced the "request specific campers" feature. Each private cabin features one cabin admin, who can invite other Wrimos to that cabin. A private cabin can be made public (so any Wrimo can be assigned to the cabin). However, an existing public cabin cannot be made private. This feature enabled existing groups of friends to stay together in a cabin.

New updates to a cabin appear in real time on the cabin page. Unlike the message board itself, the wordcounts do not update automatically and the page must be refreshed to show updated counts. A notification appears in the navigation bar when a user logs in, indicating the number of new cabin messages.

Camp Cabins are closed shortly after the specific event ends. Cabins may also be removed if all the participants opt out of the cabin. The NaNoWriMo staff has stated they have no intentions of porting the cabin feature over to the main NaNoWriMo website.

Cabins were replaced with writing groups during Camp NaNoWriMo 2020, which do not expire and are not exclusive to Camp.