I pushed an update to the site today and I changed a lot of code. Most of it is just refactoring and housekeeping so nothing noticable unless there are bugs.
I did change the friend list. Before, friends were simply a list of FFXI characters. The character didn't even have to be registered or confirm friendship. So it was essentially a equivalent to a player set. Now friends will be between users on the site. You can friend a user by their username or from their character page. A friend request is sent and they will confirm. I matched friends and created friend requests based on the old friend data, so you will likely have friend requests pending. You will be able to delete outgoing friend requests after 24 hours, to mitigate spamming. I don't have a method to ignore/deny incoming requests yet, I have already seen a need for this.
Having friends in this manner allows me to develop features that give users better privacy control. e.g. Who can PM you, see certain features of your profile( such as social network accounts), and features that may include collaboration.
If anyone has any questions, bugs, you can PM me or post it here.
I know Kalila is going to ask for online users on top! ;) I will try to do that today, the change should make the task easier.
Here are some screencaps:
http://www.ffxiah.com/members/friends
http://www.ffxiah.com/members/friendrequests
http://www.ffxiah.com/player/Fenrir/Scragg#friends