This is a Civilized Place for Crowdsourcing Knowledge

Please treat this Q&A Community with the same respect you would an in person group meeting. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation and shared experiences.

These are not hard and fast rules, merely guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community and keep this a safe and well-lighted place for civilized, caring and open public discussion.

If you are concerned about privacy use your username to mask your identity. If possible, do share your situation and what experience you’ve had with addiction so we know, when you ask or answer a question, where the context of your knowledge.

Improve the Community Knowledge

Help us make this a useful place to find answers and support by always working to improve the knowledge shared in some way, however small. Think through what questions you can ask to draw out community experiences and knowledge. All questions are good ones!

Keep returning to search for questions you can answer from your experience. Even if you haven’t experienced exactly what someone is questioning, it’s likely you’ve experienced something similar and sharing what happened in your situation will be very helpful to someone else.

The questions asked and answered here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the questions and the people answering them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said - feel free to share that in your own answer from your own experience.

One way to improve the knowledge shared is by adding your own answer to questions asked, whether they have answers or not. Spend time browsing the questions and answering a few, and if they spark any questions of your own then jump in to ask separately. You’ll soon find yourself meeting others who share your experiences.

Use Empathy, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to a question with a strong, perhaps even unpopular, point of view. That’s fine. But remember provide answers that are true to you and grounded in your own experience.

Please avoid:

• Name-calling
• Ad hominem attacks
• Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
• Knee-jerk contradiction

Your Participation Counts

Since this community is built on knowledge from our lived experiences we want you to keep coming back and adding to it.

The questions and answers we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage with questions that make this forum a helpful and supportive place to be — and avoiding those that do not.

We provide tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) answers: upvotes, bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

Let’s leave our community knowledge-base better than we found it - and all the more useful for those concerned Friend & Family members who’ll follow in our footsteps.

This also goes for any feedback on how to make this community knowledge-base better or more useful to you. We named this site Village because society has left the fate of our loved one’s in our hands and we’re taking back control starting now - and we’re doing it together. Help us build something truly useful by telling us what you need and how we can help more.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a helpful community like rudeness:

• Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
• Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
• Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
• Respect our knowledge-base. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.
• However, do be honest and open and tell it like it is, this is one place in our lives where we reliably can tell the truth of how we are feeling and be understood and not judged.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if you were in the recipient’s shoes.

This is a public community Q&A, and search engines index this knowledge-base. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Make It Helpful

How to ask a good question:

• Be direct in the header - what is the core of the question? Are you looking to compare or get recommendations or something else?
• Add context - the more context you provide the better answers the community will be able to provide.
• Consider including details: substance involved, is this the first time you’re facing this question.
• Don’t divert a question by changing it midstream. Consider adding a separate question if there’s another issue to cover.
• Don’t sign your question (or answer) — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing question in a radically different direction, post a new separate question. The more direct and contextual questions are, the better answers the community will be able to give.

Ask and Answer Only From Your Own Experience

You may share links that have been helpful to you but the best answers will come from your own personal experience with addiction, through your relationship with someone struggling with substances.

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

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This site is operated by your friendly local staff and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.