You can help stop that. Post up photos, keep up conversation. It takes some work, yes, but it needs to happen.
We can't have events run 100% off-NAXJA and still have them expect to be official NAXJA events. I've heard from a couple different people that were planning on hitting AZ Fest but figured it was a dead event due to no activity. Even I had to reach out to your president to make sure it was really happening.