A Users Guide to The Alliance Forums

Hello, and welcome to The Alliance Forums,

Who we are and what we do.

The Alliance is a British charity whose key objective is the improvement of drug treatment in the UK. Historically, drug treatment has often been both poor in terms of it's quality, and has also been a source of much misinformation and myths about the subjects of drugs, drug misuse, drug dependence and people who have drug problems. Rather than actually helping people to reduce their drug problems, drug services have often made them worse.

And so the methods that we use to pursue those objectives are service user advocacy and inolvement in the policy process. Although we consider ourselves a national organisation, one of the consequences of the recent devolution of Scotland and Wales has meant that all of our funding has been focused on enabling our work in England, and the vast majority of our advocacy experience has been with the English health service.

About the forums.

The Alliance Forums then, are primarily a place that enable us to continue this work on an on-line format. Although people will inevitably develop social relationships on the forum, please remember that this forum is a working tool for The Alliance. It is one of the public faces that we use to present ourselves and our work to the world.

Etiquette.

As a consequence, we expect people to treat each other respectfully. While differences of opinion will sometimes emerge, please attempt to be civil, no matter how strongly you may disagree with the other person.

Remember, it's fine to attack somebody's ideas or their arguments. However, if this crosses the line and becomes an attack on the person that's making those arguments, your post may well be deleted.

Persistently abusive posters may also be banned from posting on the forums.

Other questions/discussions that aren't really welcome are:

Questions about where to score or any attempts at dealing.

'Where can I find a doctor who is prepared to prescribe X'. We're happy to entertain general discussion about the principles of prescribing. We're happy for people to discuss the concrete details of their treatment. However, if we allowed people to ask questions about where someone can hook up with a doctor who prescribes amps/benzos/pills/etc then it wouldn't be long before the place descended into a source of drug markets intelligence and that's just not what we're here for.

Also, please pick a screen name and stick to it. The only way people know you on an online forum is through your screen name and people like to know who they're talking to. This stupid software allows users to change their screen name, which is dumb, but it does. Please don't do it. Give people the courtesy of letting them know who they are talking to.

Advertising/Spam

It shouldn't need saying, but just so as we're clear -- any form of advertising is strictly forbidden. That means even links in your .sigs. If I spot it, that's a bannin'. We ban first, and ask questions later. So much of my time is taken up running around, trying to keep spam at bay that it's ridiculous and so if you fall into that category, I'ma gon come getcha! Just don't do it, please. Respect your fellow forum members.

Advice on the forums.

An important note of caution here: One of the major reasons that people read or sign up to this forum is because they are looking for advice or information about some aspect of drugs or drug treatment. We have some extremely well qualified, extremely knowledgable posters who give advice on this forum. Occasionally, we also get some relatively poorly informed people with crackpot ideas about drugs and drug treatment.

Before you rely upon any of the advice that's offered on the forums, please check to see whether or not it has been posted by a staff member, or just a forum member. If our staff don't know the answer to a question, they won't post. They won't just make things up, or post their guesses. If we don't know, we'll make it our business to find out what the answer is. And if the issue is pressing, you can always call the Alliance Helpline on 0845 122 8608.

Despite what I say above, the forum is very fortunate in having two particularly helpful posters in the form of Jim and Simon. Both of these people have long histories of work in the drug treatment field, have extremely high levels of expertise in this area, and are very generous with their time when it comes to contributing to these forums. If either Jim or Simon provide you with advice on one of your questions, you can pretty much take it to the bank that their answer will be correct.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank them both for their contributions here over the last couple of years.

Joining the forums.

Unfortunately, because of the high levels of spam on the internet these days, this forum, like most others, has to have some form of sign-up procedure to enable us to sort the real members from potential spammers.

Inevitably, this process involves guesswork, and from time to time, the innocent will get locked out with the guilty. If you believe that that's happened to you, either drop me an email to peter@m-alliance.org.uk, or call the helpline and mention it to someone there and we'll try and get it sorted.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things that you can avoid if you don't want to be caught by our spam controls. These include:

- Don't use a Chinese email address.
- Don't use a Russian email address.
- Avoid using a free webmail account.
- All of Eastern Europe is pretty damn suspect. If you're a real eastern European seeking to join, drop us an email first.
- Don't call yourself any of the following names:
   -- mrherbalviagra
   -- hotpornxxx
   -- milfsagogo
   -- cigsforcheap
- And don't give yourself a user name that is just random characters, a la:
   -- uiuywer
   -- fdgdsdf
   -- tyurtewe
   -- vxcxvxcw
- Because all of that stuff goes straight into the trash.

In short, try and use a real username, or a sensible nickname, an email account allocated by an internet service provider and avoid free webmail based email accounts and you shouldn't have a problem. The more of those things I see together, the more likely you'll be to get deleted as a spammer.

gmail addresses also tend to go straight into the trash, because 95% of people who read/use this board are from the UK, and here, gmail is called googlemail, so if I see a gmail account and it doesn't have a real name attached to it -- you guessed it, straight into the trash.

Sometimes, I'll inevitably get it wrong. If you think I've got it wrong in your case, or you're a legitimate reader having trouble, shoot me an email -- peter at m-alliance dot org dot uk -- and I'll sort it out for you.

If there is anything else I can think of, I'll add it to this document as I go along. Until that point, welcome to the forums, we're a friendly and supportive bunch of people in the main, so I hope you enjoy your time here, and remember, just like most electronic forums, the more that you put in, the more you get out.

Peter McDermott
Alliance Training and Policy Lead, and
Forums Administrator