How about, rename to contacts, hosts/surfers are automatically added, you can manually request other users (as now for friends), and people can only see their mutual friends with you, not the whole list?
Maybe that covers all the features people are wanting without being too social network-y?
Follow up question: do hosts/surfers get automatically added upon host request confirming? And is it kept even if the request is cancelled?
I’ve proposed in the dashboard thread that details of all upcoming trips should be displayed there (requests per se and approved requests with all the host’s contact details). Besides I think it makes sense to generally add a contact upon the request being confirmed. In edge cases like two hosts confirming or yourself not arriving due to some unforeseen circumstance you’d have to remove the contact manually – sounds fine by me.
Visibility: Sure, maybe don’t display the contact list publicly; but do make it public insofar as it’s usable by the contacts-of-contacts search filter. If someone’s against it they could manually set their list to completely private (put a small explanation next to that checkbox pointing to the pros and cons in a few words).
Nope
Not sure if people are waiting to get automatically added when hosted? Don’t want to have hundreds of friends/contacts if you host a lot. Or like FB where lot of people have thousands of friends where they never talk to… Some surfers I add as friends since I felt connected to them, some others not 
The people you invite for events are mainly locals which I’ve met through (other) events. Not through hosting, only some of them when they search for a studio/room or so.
Ok another word vomit post coming up on how I envision this feature to be, so that it can be useful for all parties.
Instead of it being a friends list, it’s going to be an “Address Book” or “Contacts”. Users with confirmed and finished interactions - be it through hosting, surfing, hangouts, attending an event, will have an option presented to them - i.e. “Do you want these users to be added to your Contacts? [Checklist]” This will NOT require acceptance on the end of the other party, as we don’t want it to be another “Friends” feature - also, the “Friends” feature was pointless because you could message anyone even if you weren’t friends anyway. The main point of “Contacts” is to present a low-effort way for people within a community to keep each other in the periphery of their minds, easy to reach out at any time.
I envision a couple of usages of “Contacts”. Most importantly, users should be able to SEARCH this list by a) name, b) home city, and c) form specific lists if you want to, such as “Football buddies”.
For parties without confirmed and finished interactions, you can still manually request to add people to your “Contacts”, but these would have to be accepted to minimise the commercial ad spam. (On second thought, why would anyone want to add someone as a friend if they’ve never interacted before? Maybe this can be skipped altogether to cockblock creepos) You can also remove “Contacts” or block invites from someone if you realise they’re misusing the feature.
As for a “friends of friends” feature, I don’t think it’s a priority, but it can be considered down the road if there’s a lot of demand for it. It could be as simple as showing “this person has interacted with X and Y from your Contacts!” within a user’s profile - might be a conversation starter or bonding point as some of you have mentioned.
Thoughts and ideas welcome!
Disagree with this point only, people really liked this showing up when they were searching. Rest sounds good to me!
Got it! Will include a “Common contacts” thing in search and profiles 
I like all these points. I wonder if people would also be interested in a ‘find my friends’ kind of feature, where you can enable (some or all) people on your contacts list to see what town you’re in
There is a bookmark function, but stupid enough only in the app. It’s sometimes strange how they don’t have multi cross platform support for all functions or integrated them badly. For example, for searching for a member in the app you have to go the account and then click search member instead of using the search bar as on the website.
So Friends is implemented in the alpha app. One thing I really like is how messaging is connected to friends. You can’t just directly message any user (outside of hosting requests, or meetups later on I assume) but you have to pick from your friends list. Or send a friend request first. I think this could help a lot against spamming messages.
I still don’t think friends is a good term here. Why not name the entire section Connections or something along these lines? This has a prime spot in the main menu right now, but I can’t see much developing around a friends section, apart from having this list of contacts.
On the other hand, we already have a lot of discussion around different ways of connecting with other members. I’d hope that a more dedicated term would also encourage more dedicated thoughts down the line on how we can develop and grow this to be more than a list, but rather a fully developed section of the platform.
I’m into this name for it, too. I love the “connecting” aspect of things and I like the idea of emphasizing it here.
I think “connections” is a much better term!
The one other thing I used the “friends” feature of CS for is whenever I created an event, I could select all of the people I knew who I though might be interested in the event (and exclude those who wouldn’t be interested or able to attend) when I sent out invites to the event.
I liked the friend of a friend feature because it helped me connect with other people I might not have connected with. For example, the former CS Community Manager, Martina, was friends with a friend of mine from Switzerland (turns out they are even best friends!) and because of that we started messaging each other and she ended up coming to the Madison Couch Crash. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been that initial connection due to a mutual friend.
Personally, I never really felt any use of it.
• Sometimes it was confusing for me to see hundreds of “friends” on some people’s profiles who never host or travel.
• it was also annoying sometimes, cuz some people were sending me a friend request out of the blue. People I never met or talk to.
• And with travelers or hosts who I felt a good friendly like connection - I kept in touch anyway, by exchanging WhatsApp or other messengers. And we met again, become a good friends or message each other time to time outside of CS app.
I completely agree! Super annoying and inappropriate to receive a friend request from someone you never met or know.
Speaking of receiving friend requests from someone you never met…
Am I right that there is currently no way to remove someone from your Friends/My Connections list once you accept a friend request?
I accepted a random friend request just to see how the function works, and I don’t see a remove option anywhere. I would think folks would find this useful in cases of misclicks or mistaken identity.
Apologies if this is already being addressed. (Is there anywhere else beside forum posts like this to see info on upcoming changes/known issues like that?)
Update: Devs confirmed they are indeed working on this feature.
We have brief updates from the dev team on the Couchers.org blog.
To see issues and upcoming changes in detail, you can take a look at Issues and Pull requests on the couchers repository.
Should we make that information more accessible?
Thanks for the GitHub links. I was not aware of these, and they are precisely what I was looking for. I have seen the blog updates via the main couchers.org page, but I missed the GitHub stuff entirely. I can now see that there is an icon link on the main page literally right next to the login button. I don’t have much experience with GitHub, so I simply didn’t recognize the icon.
Anyway, sorry to sidetrack this thread. How best to view/collect/consolidate bugs and feature requests from casual users probably deserves its own thread.
Thanks for pointing that out! I’ll make sure to add the github link to the dev updates on the blog from now on.
I was thinking the same thing. Can we come up with an ethical way to have a private address book and a publicly acessible (by search and filter) “friends of friends”?
I love the friends feature for just that, FRIENDS. But let us be able to save other people’s profiles too, without having to add random strangers as friends if we just want to find our way easily back to somebody.
Actually, I’ve never had spamming messages in CS, but I’ve had a lot of spamming friend requests - people I’ve never met, almost exclusively men and from countries notorious for unwanted male attention. So I don’t really see any need neither for the Friends list nor for preventing users from send me messages if not in it. I actually wouldn’t like the latter at all. Maybe it could be optional - you can choose who can send messages to you