I haven't been a member of The Escapist for a terribly long time, but ever since I started to be a bit more active on the forums, I've been recieving friend requests from complete strangers.
Now, normally I don't mind friend requests. There are a number of people I never even met in real life but who I still consider to be my friends. It's one of the coolest things about the internet, if you ask me. It's for this reason that I pretty much always accept those friend requests and add them to my friendlist as well.
But out of all the friend requests I've had on The Escapist, only one of them even bothered to send a message to talk to me about why they wanted to be my friend, and even that one only sent me one line of text and has never contacted me ever since. That's hardly what I call 'friendly'. I get the feeling that most of the people friending me only do so to get the 'X friends added' badge, which is pretty damn sad.
I haven't sent any friend requests myself because I don't feel I know anyone on this board well enough to call my friend, but if I did I'd at least send them a message explaining to them why I'd like to be their friend, and if they were interesting enough for me to want to befriend I'd certainly not add them to the list only to completely ignore them afterwards.
What's your opinion on this curious behaviour, forumites?
