Friends

One of the advantages is that you can see if your friend/follower needs help, and the otherway around.

Disadventage is the number of friends that you can have, i don’t think there is a maximum number of followers that you can have.

Ah, you mean on the forum, my bad. 

I have 195 friends on the SC forums. This is similar, but may work a little differently on this board.

Usually (not always, but usually), I would send a visitor message with a friend request (or they would). If I didn’t recognize them right away, I could go to their profile page and look through their latest posts to see how they were talking to others generally, etc. and whether I wanted to accept the friend request or not.

That first message also started a conversation with them that I could look back on even years later, and keep up with how they were doing. It was like an answering machine, or sending a letter or post card. No matter how long it was between conversations when people got busy, I could go back and catch up where we left off.

Sometimes I accepted a request from a random new forumer, to make them feel welcome. (Not many became people I chatted with regularly.) That happened more often with anyone I played a forum game with. We had something in common on the forums other than the Clash universe (or the HD universe), beyond “game info” and they became more like actual online friends. It was like being in a clan or neighbourhood, but with a wider selection of really varied and interesting people from around the world.

The only disadvantage I found was when I wanted to send a message to a specific friend I’d have to scroll through (and wait to load) a few pages to find that friend in the alphabetical list, so it would take a minute. Really no big deal.

I “unfriended” someone I think only once or maybe twice ? when they became annoying—either bugging me directly, or when I’d see a lot of their posts and saw they were being troll-ish, spamming, or mean to others (didn’t seem like friendly banter or a game).

I chose to keep inactive or usually even banned people on my list, kind of as a memory of all these people I interacted with over the years. If they kept their avatars, it’s like a little forum photo album to me, haha. :whydowehavenoheartemoji: