As everyone knows, over the past week, Hullbreach has been making extensive updates to the SDK friend system.

This is just a summary of all the changes.

A New Friendlist

It is now divided into lists: "Who I Friended" and "Who Friended Me", which are pretty much self-explanatory. The "Who I Friended" list allows you to remove current friends. The "Who Friended Me" list allows you to accept or deny any users who have requested friendship. Neither accepting nor denying them only lets the person who added you see your status and mail you when you are online (a pocket veto, in a way).

Each can have white- and yellow-shaded regions. The white indicates that both parties have accepted each other. The yellow indicates that only one has accepted the other.

When friends are confirmed, one can access their profile and message them from the friendlist.

It is now known that accepting a friend request from someone and adding that someone are not the same thing. To get mailing capabilities between the two users, both must both add each other and accept each other's requests.

An Additional Privacy Option

Under "Privacy" in Settings, there is a checkbox for comments. So if you want comments on your profile to be limited to confirmed friends, then you would check this box. The feature is not yet functional.

Main Page Alerts and Activities

Both lists have been lengthened (scrollbars added) so that more activities can be viewed at once. The messaging icon in Friend Activities has also been enlarged for easier clicking.

Unfortunately, the Alerts section isn't working to the best of its ability: some alerts never show when they should, and some disappear too quickly.

Messaging

Users are now limited to messaging only other users who have been confirmed as friends. Thus, the ability to message overlords is virtually gone as their names are no longer among message-able friends.

As a little side note, accepting a friend request from the second half of the friendslist does result in a mail icon, but again, both parties must both add and accept each other to allow mailing to work.


Overall, Hull has been very busy with updating the site for the past week. Even though there is still work needed, I appreciate that and hope you do too.