The Willing

Terms of use

Effective September 29, 2026

The Willing is a free community for people in recovery. Using it means agreeing to these terms. They are short on purpose.

Who can join

Anyone in or seeking recovery, 13 or older. One account per person. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your password to yourself.

How to behave here

This is a room full of people having a hard time. Act accordingly.

• Protect anonymity — yours and everyone else's. Do not post someone else's full name, photo, contact details, or the fact that they are in recovery. What is shared here stays here.
• No harassment, threats, hate speech, or targeting an individual.
• No selling, soliciting, recruiting, or promotion — no treatment centres, no coaching, no products, no referral fees. The Willing is free and stays that way.
• No sourcing. Do not ask where to get, or offer to supply, drugs or alcohol.
• No impersonation of another member, a fellowship, or The Willing itself.
• Nothing illegal, and nothing that breaks someone else's copyright.

We may remove content or close an account that breaks these rules. Where we can, we will say why.

Reporting and moderation

Every post, comment and profile photo carries a report control, and meetings can be reported for safety concerns. Reports go to a private queue that only The Willing's safety team reads. The person reported is not told who reported them, and reports leave no public trace.

We review reports as people, not as a machine, and we are a small project — we cannot promise a response time. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number rather than waiting on us. Get Support inside the app lists free crisis lines that answer around the clock.

The Willing is not medical advice

Meeting information is not guaranteed

Meetings come from public directories and hand-curated lists. Groups move, change time, go online, or stop meeting, and directories lag behind. We cannot guarantee that any listing is accurate or current, and you should confirm with the group before relying on it — particularly before travelling to one. Listing a meeting is not an endorsement of it, and a meeting's presence here does not mean the group knows about The Willing. If you find something wrong, the report control on each meeting is the fastest way to tell us.

What you post stays yours

You keep ownership of what you write and upload. You give The Willing permission to store and display it inside the app so the community can see it — nothing more. We do not sell it, license it onward, or use it in advertising. Delete it and that permission ends, save for copies in routine backups that age out.

Literature

The Willing provides original content, openly licensed literature with attribution, and links to publishers' resources. Specifically:

• Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) — The Willing does not host the Big Book text. The app links to the official AA Big Book page (opens in a new tab). Local hosting is on hold pending confirmation of redistribution rights.
• Recovery Dharma — First Edition (version 1.0, August 2019), © 2019 Recovery Dharma, written by the Recovery Dharma community and shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The text comes from Recovery Dharma’s own PDF of that edition, as preserved by the Internet Archive. The required attribution, a link to the licence and a link to the archived copy appear with the book.
• Navigating Mental Health and Substance Use Care: An Introductory Guide for Families — a U.S. government publication from SAMHSA (PEP25-08-008, June 2026) that is in the public domain. The Willing hosts its text only, with SAMHSA's notice, the recommended citation and a link to SAMHSA's page.
• How Can a Peer Specialist Support My Recovery From Problematic Substance Use? — a U.S. government publication from SAMHSA (PEP23-02-01-004, January 2024) that is in the public domain. The Willing hosts its text only, with SAMHSA's notice, the recommended citation and a link to SAMHSA's page. Its photographs, illustrations and a worksheet SAMHSA adapted with permission from another publisher are not included.
• Roots of recovery — four older works in the public domain worldwide, each published before 1931 and by an author who died more than 100 years ago: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; James died in 1910); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (the revised text of 1847; Emerson died in 1882); James Allen, As a Man Thinketh (1903; Allen died in 1912), proofread against a scan of the Crowell Authorized Edition; and Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World (1890; Drummond died in 1897). The James, Emerson and Drummond texts come from Project Gutenberg, credited with each book; each book states its edition and where its text came from.
• Daily Reflections in The Willing — original The Willing content, not Alcoholics Anonymous' publication titled Daily Reflections.
• Big Book Awakening — nothing is hosted. The BBA workbook is copyrighted and sold by its authors, so The Willing carries only an original guide to freely available resources, which links out to the hosts' own sites.

The milestone tokens are original The Willing designs. They carry a time mark and nothing else: no fellowship names, mottoes, service marks, or symbols.

Think a work is hosted here that should not be? Email admin@thewilling.app and we will take it down while we check.

Availability and changes

The Willing is provided as it is, without warranty, by a small donation-supported project. It may be unavailable at times, and features may change or be removed. If we change these terms substantively we will update the effective date above.

Contact

Questions about these terms, an account you need closed, or a copyright concern: admin@thewilling.app. Deleting your account is described in Privacy.

Reporting unsafe content or a problem with a meeting is faster from inside the app, where the report control reaches the safety queue directly.