AA Online Meetings

AA Online is an unofficial AA website. It is not supported or endorsed by AAWS or any other service body of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The sole purpose of AA Online is to provide facilities for AA Groups to run online meetings

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Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.

The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

Types of Online Meetings
Short descriptions of online meeting types and mechanisms

This page is not intended to teach AA members how to organise an AA meeting - AA members already know how to do that. What this page does is to describe some of the benefits and drawbacks of using mailing lists, forums and chatrooms as mechanisms to hold meetings.

Mailing Lists

A mailing list is a special email address which automatically delivers a copy of each message it receives to all the members who are subscribed to the mailing list. The mailing list is looked after by a member who is normally called the 'listmaster' and whose job is to add and remove members' email addresses as members join or leave the meeting. The AAOnline mailing lists can be set up to be more automatic so that members can subscribe and/or unsubscribe themselves. But there will always be a 'listmaster' with a password to make changes to the way the mailing list is configured, even if he or she doesn't have to add and remove members' email addresses.

Mailing lists have been used to run AA meetings since around 1990. They are a very convenient way to run a meeting as members do not need to log in to a forum system or chatroom; they get their meeting mail along with the rest of their email and can read it at their leisure, and reply if they wish to. Busy email meetings can generate quite a lot of email, so members can also configure their mailing list settings to receive their meeting mail in batches, so that they receive all the mail for a 24 hour period in a single, larger email.

Forum Meetings

Forums use a website to hold meetings. Each member logs into the forum system using an ID and password in order to read the posts that members in the meeting have made. Sometimes, if the meeting is an 'open' it is not necessary to log in to read the meeting comments, but it is necessary to log in to add a comment.

Although a forum system might be a little more inconvenient as you need to access the website and then log in to the forum system, they can help preserve anonymity where using an email address might cause problems. Members accessing a meeting from work, for example, might not want to use their work email address. When going away on holiday, it also means members can still access the forum system if they can get access to an Internet-connected computer. Forums have become a very popular way of providing communications to groups of people, not just AA members.

Chatroom Meetings

Chatroom meetings are 'live' and to attend a chatroom meeting you need to log into the chatroom at the time when the meeting is due to take place. In this respect, they are similar to face-to-face AA meetings.

Chatrooms meetings are popular with newcomers as the anonymity they provide allows them to attend a meeting without making a committment. They can dip their toe in the water and see what an AA meeting is like. So, despite the drawback of having to log in at a specific time, chatroom meetings are growing in popularity. Normally, if no meeting is taking place, chatrooms are in 'open chat' mode, which allows newcomers to ask questions in a very easygoing and friendly atmosphere, provided thare are some AA members online, of course.

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