A couple of you have noticed that friend requests have disappeared from rosnf.net. Many of you may not have noticed. Here’s why they have gone…
The concept of “friends” here on rosnf.net did not have the same meaning that it does on Facebook, and it caused confusion as a result.
Any member of ROSNF here on rosnf.net can see your profile and posts, whether they were a “friend” or not. Most aspects of the members are no longer visible to anyone who does not have an account on rosnf.net, but once you log in, you can see just about everything. The only things that are restricted within the membership are:
- Private messages – visible only to you and the person you messaged
- Anything that is posted in a private group for each of our committees
Being a “friend” of someone enabled you to do the following 2 things:
- Filter the recent activity stream to only show posts by your “friends” (you had to visit your own profile to click on the “Friends” feed
- Invite someone to join a group – which only really applies to the admins of the committees.
Neither of those were critical, nor used much at all.
A few of our members expressed the view that they were uncomfortable about receiving friend requests here on rosnf.net, and they requested that the functionality be turned off. They were ok with friend requests on Facebook, but did not want to have to deal with friend requests here.
A poll of members on our Facebook group showed that those in favour of removal of the friend function here far outweighed those who liked it.
And so, the friend function has been disabled.