Ok boys and girls. I know many of you have this affliction. It's called "I want to be as successful as Facebook so I need to copy all their ideas" isis.
The idea of "friends" only works on sites where creating a list of friends is helpful in managing a MASSIVE amount of contacts or on a dating site where people only want to interact with whom they choose. For all other sites, it drains the life out of the project!
I have paid people to help me build auto friend systems, with limited (and expensive) results, I have installed the auto friends mod that makes everyone friends with the admin, but all of these things only partially help and only attack the symptom, not the problem.
I need to completely REMOVE the friends feature from my site. It is limiting, and in some cases, completely halting communication between my members.
The idea of friends should be an add on mod, not part of the base script. I know I am not the onbly one that has come to this conclusion. I would LOVE to be able to just turn it off. On a content specific site like mine, it just dooms the entire project to failure.
