The rules
How this site is written, and who pays for it.
On this subject the funding and the refusals matter more than the prose, so both are published rather than implied.
Who writes it
One person, with an SI (super intelligence) used as a drafting and review tool. Nothing on this site is published without being read by James, and the SI guide on the site is labelled as an SI in its own first line every time.
Who pays for it
Readers, through membership at the network console. Nobody else. No clinic, broker, treatment provider, fellowship, insurer, medication company or law firm has ever paid for content, placement, mention or a link on this network, and no referral fee has ever been accepted. There are no affiliate links and no advertising.
The only declared interest is historic and personal: James was a paying patient at one private clinic in 2020, named on the about page, which has never paid for anything here and is not recommended.
What is refused
- No named clinic recommendations, rankings or comparisons
- No diagnosis of anybody, from any description
- No advice to leave a relationship, and no advice to stay in one
- No doses, tapers, detox schedules or medication instructions, for him or for you
- No telephone numbers, because they differ by country and change
- No price figures anywhere in the pages or from the guide; the figure lives on the join page
- No commercial prompt shown to somebody describing tonight, or fear, or being hurt
- No claim that anything here is secure, private in a legal sense, or monitored
How safety is handled
Every message to the guide passes a narrow safety check before anything else happens. If it indicates danger, a medical emergency, a child at risk, physical withdrawal, or crisis in the reader, the guide stops working on the subject and names the appropriate route. That happens whether or not any allowance is left, because safety routes are never counted and never withheld.
The distinction between a drinking problem and a safety problem is treated as the most important editorial judgement on this site, and it is set out openly on the line.
Sources, and admitting the limits
Where a factual claim about treatment, medication or outcomes is made, it is sourced or it is marked as one person’s experience. Nothing is invented — not a study, not a statistic, not an organisation. The long reference material for this network is kept once, on the encyclopedia at sober.guide, rather than rewritten badly on every site.
Corrections are made in place. If something here is wrong, it is changed rather than argued with.