"Friending" protocol on MF

[gp0560]

To answer your specific question...

 

There are settings in the user control panel where you can limit access to various parts of your profile to your friends only instead of leaving it wide open to all visitors. There are other features that we don't have turned on that you can likewise limit to your friends.

 

It's a feature that's far more useful on a far more heavily populated -- and far less anonymous -- forum.

 

Aha! That's the kind of answer I was looking for. Thanks, deej, I'll look into the options.

[gcursor]

I've accepted people as friends periodically. However the bad part comes when you drop them as a friend (after 6 months of no communication). All of a sudden, their world is going to crumble to its very foundations all brought on by you. I think of friends on here the same way as I do on Facebook. They are just "electronic acquaintances" and nothing more. I have to have time to cultivate friendships and when I see that some people's ideas of doing that consist of saying, "Hey! " then I know that they probably are just one of those people on Facebook that I see that have 500 friends!

 

Seriously! What can you possibly want with 500 friends? Yes, you're popular..good for you! But are you trying to get to some plateau where people all bow before you as the champion of Facebook friendship? It's the same way with TWITTER. I mean it's OK if you want to "collect" people like this and see how many you can accumulate but don't try to fool yourself or anybody else into thinking that these are all "friends" of yours. A few of them are but some of them are just people you met one time at a function late at night or somebody who said "call me" and you never did but you felt guilty so you friended them on FACEBOOK and so on and so forth.

 

I used to be big on trimming my Communicator IM contacts down all the time in the office Most people would accept anybody that would talk to them and they would get these lists of 75-100 people. I would often wonder how they knew who all these people were. I tried hard to keep my contacts down to 20 names or less. Of course to show some people at the company the FOLLY of adding all these people to communicator, I eventually started adding EVERY SINGLE PERSON from the outlook address book to my communicator contacts. My plan at that point in time was to do away with EMAIL because god knows people were using IM for email most of the time anyway.

 

THEM: Hi, did you get that project request I sent to you? Somebody is asking about it and I have to know what to tell them.

ME: DO YOU NOT HAVE E-MAIL?

THEM: Well yes but I figured if you were right there then you could tell me what I wanted to know

ME: You know, one of the reasons that they MADE email is so people couldnt bother you EVERY MINUTE of the day! People normally use it as a way to "prioritize" the incoming tasks to be done. When you ASK me about this then you short-circuit the process!

THEM: So you can't tell me?

ME: Not right now. I'm busy. I'll look into it later

THEM: Ok. thanks.

[+ Lucky]

For me the friend function serves a more of a "like" button. If I extend a friend request, it means that I like the person's posts. If someone extends one to me, I usually accept it on the same assumption. I agree that it would be better if we had encountered each other in the forums and shown a common interest in topics or people. But some requests come in from people who I have not related to in a thread. What to do? Turn them down? No it is no big deal to say sure, we can be friends. But the fact of the matter is that once the friend request is accepted, life goes on much as it would had there been no friend function. It's not like my friends come to my aid when someone is attacking me!