Friends, Friends, Friends, Friends, Friends.

How do you define a friend? The Free dictionary defines it like this:

friend  (frnd)

It wasn't that many years ago when the idea of 'befriending' someone online in a social network hadn't even been thought of yet. Now it seems to be all the rage and except for a few cases, I disagree with it completely. I believe there is nothing more destructive than a friends mod in a community that blocks you from seeing the other people on a site.

When you join a site, do you go there to be all alone?

In fact, I would say the only time I see the friends adaptation as useful is when the site is so big (like Facebook) that it wouldn't be manageable without it. When I join a community, I do so because I have intentions of interacting with the people there. In fact, the only reason I started using Facebook (less than 2 years ago) was because I saw it as a way to attract new members to my site, a site with a very specific theme.

My site and most other topic specific sites don't need the friend mod. It hinders the sites growth dramatically. Hell, even Facebook didn't originally have the Friends mod. It was only installed after the sites astronomical growth in the beginning as a way to manage massive security issues that were arising. All of the security I need can be managed by the access levels for the different membership types.

The Friend modifications are only an extra layer you have to train new users how to manage and use and many won't mess with it, they just click through and go somewhere else.

Jesus, I've been harping on this forever. I'm growing weary of it and as long as this problem exists for me, my site will never make the leap to the next step.

Is there anyone here that can completely remove or disable the entire friends part of a Dolphin site?

Ok, I have tried to fix the spacing in my post twice now.

Worthless Fish Forum......

Ok, my stumbling block for upgrading to 7.2 is right here. It is, and always has been, my biggest stumbling block with this script. This post (one of many I made over the years) explains it perfectly and instead of creating a whole new topic thread, I decided to restart this one.

I did manage to get a developer from India to create a mod that worked well for me. it was simple and effective and up until recently, worked perfectly within my little internet world. Now I need to re visit this topic again because I am not sure the very old mod I had made for me some years ago will work with 7.2

The friends system in Dolphin kills a site, especially if it's a smaller, very topic specific site like mine.

So why don't you just disable all privacy groups except 'public'?

I thought of that before and tried it but by doing that, I created another problem. I can't remember exactly what it was. I will need to look at my notes and respond back here.

 OK then..... take some Ginkgo Biloba and report back tomorrow.

I too have this problem as I am using Dolphin for members of a club. I want the site to be private to the outside world, but for everyone inside to be friends.. so how would one go about that? With the number of members, it's daunting to have to go friend everyone in the site...

You could not install friends privacy groups; the other thing is the profile viewing setting.

I did it with a mod. When someone joins, they are presented with a question on the join page.It gives the user the choice to auto send requests to all new users automatically when they join. It actually worked pretty well. If you wanted to be alone, leave it unchecked, if you wanted to partake, check the box and everyone gets a friends request.

.

No one?

 No one what?

 Check out the Admin as Friend module.

I have the Admin as friend mod. It doesn't do what I want. It only allows me to be friends with all my members, not member to member associations.

This is the only thing holding me up from upgrading. I won;t upgrade until I know I can reinstall a mod that does this. I am worried that my current mod won't work and I''ll be left with a digital cave where no one can see anyone else again.

 I remember now, it forces everyone to be public.