Friend system for WCF 2.1 1.0.3

Adds a friend system to the WCF 2.1

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The friend system works independently from the follower system and offers the following features:

• The online status (and with an experimental option, the profile) can be made visible to friends only.
• Adds a dropdown to the panel which lists all friends that were recently active.
• Friendships are only accomplished if both parties consent: One person sends a request, and the other accepts or denies it.
• Users get a notification if it's the birthday of one or more friends.
• In the profile there's a list of friends shown, similar to the follower or visitor list.
• If two users became friends, that can be published as activity.
• Worried about privacy? All points I just listed are under complete control of your users. If somebody doesn't want to tell their friends that it's their birthday, they can do so simply by unchecking a setting. Also, if two users became friends this isn't published as activity by default. Rather, both users must have enabled the respective setting to generate an activity entry.
• Ingoing friend requests can be automatically blocked, if somebody doesn't feel like becoming friends with other users.
• New (1.0.3): Some features can be disabled globally. (ACP → Modules → Friend System)
• New (1.0.3): The Follower System can be suppressed. (ACP → Modules → Friend System)

But why would you need a friend system?

The main reason is that the follower system is unsuitable to signalize friendships. Many people, for example, aren't interested in everything their friends write. So in order to keep their dashboard free of clutter, they don't follow them, whereas seemingly random people get to stay in the list because they write interesting posts. Friends may feel offended by that.

The friend system can solve this issue by adding features that are useful for friends and that the follower system doesn't have. Thus, the follower system can be considered as „list of interesting people“, whereas the friend system is there for friends.

Differences to Sonnenspeer's Friend List

Sonnenspeer's Friend List uses the Follower System, so that friendship is conveyed by two users following each other. This results in different advantages and disadvantages: For example, with his plugin users don't have to manage a separate list so that the forum doesn't get as cluttered, whereas with my plugin users have more control over who they regard as a friend.

A separate plugin for the WSC 3.0 is available here.

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Status – 1.0.2:

Please disregard this section if a newer version is already available. You don't get a notification if an update has been published, so it can happen that the plugin description is temporarily out-of-date. In that case, check out the version description for information about which of the following points have been addressed.

Changes planned for the next update: -

Known bugs: -