Greetings hackers,
If you participated in CaroliaCon 2025, you probably heard that as of November 10th, 2025, we had expected to put CarolinaCon on hiatus. This post is a reversal of that announcement.
We wanted to take the time to explain why this happened and why we are reversing this decision.
To start with "Why?", the current operators took over the conference 7 years ago, with the last 5 being a free, online-only event with a free, in-house CTF. In these 7 years, many of the operators have gone through significant life changes, including moving to different parts of the country, starting families, getting more demanding jobs... You get the idea. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for us to organize the conference in general. We decided, together in a vote among the operators, that we wanted to retire from organizing the conference before we risked anyone in particular taking on too much work or, even worse, things just not getting done.
That being said, we used the word "indefinite" during our announcement as we weren't sure what would happen to CarolinaCon, but, over the 20 or so hours since we made this information public, we have had an incredible response from you, the hacker community, concerning what you can do and how you can help to keep CarolinaCon going. As a result, we are much more confident that CarolinaCon will continue, even next year, with the help of new operators.
That being said, we are all new to the process of retiring from a conference, so please bear with us. We think the best first-step forward is to collect information from those interested in helping continue CarolinaCon and its corresponding CTF.
If that sounds like you, please send an email to [email protected] letting us know so we can start putting together information about who is interested. Some of you have already reached out to me or other operators individually via Discord or Matrix, but, please, send an email to [email protected] so we have a centralized location for contact information. We have no desire to see CarolinaCon end, and the positive comments and earnest requests to help run the conference going forward have been nothing short of uplifting.
Future updates concerning next year's CarolinaCon will come out through the Discord and Matrix, so, stay in those channels if you want to know what happens next!
See you on the other side,
- vr0n, matt, Wes, trvon, Wonkey