PM's, Buddy List and Friends

[Tony Smith]

The Private Messaging feature allows you to send a confidential message to another member, or indeed up to 5 members at one time. To speed up the addressing of PM's, you can create a "Buddy List", much the same as a contact list in an email account. On the home page of the Forum, it tells you when your "Buddies" are logged on, so giving the opportunity to zap off a quick PM knowing it will be received in realtime, so increasing the chances of a quick reply.

However, in one of the recent upgrades of the software, a new feature has appeared, that of creating "Friends". I've received, and responded to, a few requests to accept a friend, but I don't understand what this feature does or how it works. Does it allow any sort of enhanced messaging or other feature, or is it just fluff like Facebook, where my profile can say something meaningless like "I have 2597 Friends"? Does it mean that when a Friend is logged on, my virtual Beer will dissapear from my cyber fridge?