The goal of this feature is to make friend-request spam almost nonexistent. No, “it doesn’t bother me” is not constructive nor on-topic – please don’t post that here. How much a feature is wanted is gauged by how many likes / votes a feature has, so these redundant remarks result in nothing beneficial – only arguments. If you notice a potential problem with the feature, you are encouraged to point it out so we can improve the feature as a whole, but “it doesn’t affect me” is not – we could have told the same thing by the lack of a like/post from you.
Why is it a problem?
With the dawn of the new Friends & Followers system, friends aren't the same as they were when first introduced to the site. Now, there's no reason for people we don't know to send us friend requests -- that's what following someone is for. As friend requests are reserved for people we know, we have complete control over who we accept as our friend. What we lack though is control over who can send us requests.
It makes no sense for some random person you’ve never met before to send you a friend request, so why should they be allowed to? The only result allowing them to do so accomplishes is the menial labor required to decline all of them – nothing good. Regardless of whether it’s actually possible to prevent friend requests from random people, preventing truly random requests (false positives are an issue with implementation – not the idea) is definitely nothing but beneficial.
Talk about ideals
So, how do we *ideally* properly prevent friend requests from random people? The mediums you can meet someone on ROBLOX and become friends with them are: in-game, on the forums, on a group wall, through PMs, party system (i.e. invited to chat by a friend who has one of his friends already there) and off-site (i.e. you're friends with someone irl) Comments really aren't a place you can become actual friends with someone, so I didn't include them in that list -- you can become friend **ly** with someone through comments, but a couple of chat messages between you doesn't make you friends. Obviously it's not feasible to track most of that stuff (whether you met them in-game, etc), so that's why I listed them as *ideal* and not solutions.
The solution:
What can we do to come as close as possible to those ideal solutions? From what I’ve come up with, allowing users to limit their friend requests to “in-game, mutual, and friends of friends” and “everyone”. The latter of the two is self-explanatory, but the former isn’t. In-game is common sense. Friends of friends means friends of people who you’re friends with at the time time of the request can ask to be your friend. This is meant to cover people you’ve hung out with in parties and partially in-game (but didn’t friend in-game). Mutual means you both have to send friend requests to each other to become friends, and either party won’t see the friend request (unless they’re friends of friends). This is meant to cover people you’ve met outside of ROBLOX, over the forums, on a group wall, through PMs, and also through parties. In all of these mediums you’ll be able to communicate “Hey do you want to be friends?” “I sent a friend request, can you send me one too?”.
The default behavior would be “everyone” (current behavior), so this way we don’t run into any issues with “Why can’t I send people friend requests?” for the most part. We will need a “This user has disabled incoming friend requests except for x,y, and z” though so people know why the button is greyed out.
Would you benefit from control over who can send you friend requests?
Yes
Yes2
0voters
Some people are afraid of the like button, so a poll is a better means of finding out how many people would use the feature. Why is there only one option? How many people would not use it is irrelevant to the feature, and if you notice a problem, you should post about it here or like an existing post that points out the problem. I will not enable driveby negative nancies to spam polls – if you have something to say, say it. Contribute to the community.
Someone remind me to contact EchoReaper whenever I want a new feature request.
On-topic: It would be a bit annoying if 2 people block requests.
They wouldn’t be able to friend eachother without temporarily “unlocking” it. (idea: read below)
Would this be like the “Who can PM me” thing where there’s a dropdown with options?
“Everyone” VS “Followers” make no sense (someone can just quickly follow to send a FR).
“Everyone” VS “People I follow” would be useful, also for that “unlocking” I talked about 3 sentences ago.
If you’re following someone, you probably wouldn’t mind a FR from that person.
(Even if you don’t want to be friends, declining those would be easier than declining from everyone)
“hey zombody your cool let’s be friends” One second of silence.
→ “xXinsertrandomnamewithoutcaptialshere1234 wants to be friends with you!”
Every. Single. Time.
I can’t just disable my friend requests because there might be a time when I get a friend request from someone because he/she wants to talk to me about something important through messages. (I have messages set to friends-only to block spam and nooby messages). This feature would be insanely useful for me. +1
