I somehow managed to accidentally send a friend request (god I hate Facebook) to one of my son’s teenage schoolmates after being a chaperon at a Relay for Life event. It seems she immediately accepted it, which I thought was rather odd since she didn’t know me. Made me feel kinda creepy even though it was entirely accidental.
One of my FB friends loves recommending everyone to each other. The other day I received a friend request from a friend of hers. I declined it because I don’t know her friend.
I keep my feed relatively small and I have filters all over the place. I also have a quirk where I don’t want people I know IRL to know anything about my online life, so I have to keep everyone in their own filter. Once in a while Facebook will throw a “Kiz replied to X” and it’s to one of the online friends…and somebody IRL will ask me about it or about the OP.
All my coworkers have friended each other. My manager has friended everybody. I find that bizarre.
I usually check the name against the list on the SDMB FB page 'cos I am that sad. If they’re not on the list then I might message back to ask how they know me, otherwise if I can’t imagine that they really know me, I reject them.
Sometimes I’ll friend them out of curiosity and see what they post or what they choose to comment on. They might stay, they might get unfriended. Who knows?
And Friend request sent! 
Request sent 
Are any of you guys Benson Smith btw? I got an out of the blue request from him a few months ago, denied it, but the home city made me wonder if he had tracked me from here.
I have several hundred Friends through Steampunk, Rennies, and Pirates. I have Friends from comic book, vintage aviation and pin-up groups. I get several Friend request a day because I am consistently awesome and amusing on Facebook.
I approve anyone who is legitimately linked to my existing Friends. Otherwise they are ignored. (I am currently being followed by what appears to be several bow-tie salesmen and hookers.)
This kind of shit just baffles me. What’s the big deal? It’s just Xs and Os on a screen. If some people enjoy it, what’s the harm? Why is so important to guard the details of your life as if you were the president? The world changes, technology marches on… Language, clay tablets, art on cave walls, western union, phones, TVs, computers, email, Facebook.
I have an account I use for keeping up with close friends and family but generally I don’t use it much - just not my cup of tea. But you won’t find me on my knees with clenched fists screaming up at heaven, “How in gods name did we get here?”
If I friend someone who turns out to post stuff I don’t like I just unfriend. Simple. Easy.
I took myself off that list, and unliked the page (or left the public group? whatever) - I do enough ranting about Facebook friends & family in the Pit, I don’t need them getting curious about this thing I’ve liked on FB, and wandering over here to try and guess which poster I am
One of my oldest online friends would reply: Because I came of internet age when anonymity was the biggest perk of being online.
A lot of my friends have basically “given up” in terms of maintaining any kind of anonymity. They figured that Facebook would out them sooner or later, so they deleted their accounts on LiveJournal, stopped posting here, stopped posted in other places.
I probably will always maintain whatever anonymity I can still personally maintain
My husband doesn’t have a Facebook account, so I sometimes get friend requests from people who don’t know me but know him. I’ll reject those requests, because it’s not a joint Facebook account, it’s all mine. But I always ask him first, in case I do know the person and they just don’t look like their profile picture or something.
But that’s not exactly the same as what you’re asking, because in those cases, the person sending the request will have mutual friends and I’ll be able to figure out that they probably know my husband.
When I get a request from someone who honestly doesn’t seem to have any connection to my life, I click through just to make sure it’s not someone from high school who got a name change. And if I still don’t recognize the person, I reject the request.
If Roger Daltrey or Pete Townshend ever sent me a friend request, I’d definitely accept! 
I’ve gotten a few "your friend request has been accepted’ messages lately, and I am baffled each time. I haven’t purposely sent any friend requests, but somehow I generating them.
When I get requests from people I don’t know, I will look at as much of their profile as I can see, and check for mutual friends, then decide. Someone with hundreds of friends, I see as just looking for numbers, as opposed to being interested in me, so I hit ignore, others I accept. There’s always the option to unfriend later.
At one time, when I first started a sport, one of my facebook friends suggested a big list of people to friend who were involved in the sport. Surprisingly, most of them accepted my request, perhaps because we shared a mutual friend. It’s been a great way to network and learn, and over the last few years, I have even met a few of them in person at events, which is pretty cool.
This is one reason I ended up closing my account. I got friend requests from strangers pretty much every day.
Same thing on Match.com. I get requests to chat, a dozen or more a day, and when I look at their profile they’re a thousand miles away and supposedly looking for men 30 years younger and within 50 miles. I don’t chat long, but there’s a remarkable similarity of language. I’m pretty sure that if I kept up the chatter, sooner or later there would be a request for money to come visit or for mom’s surgery or …
I just ignore them. If it’s someone I (know and) want to catch-up with, I’ll send them a message and go from there. If I don’t know `em, ain’t no way I’m friending them. At one time I had 8 “friends”, but I booted a few of them to keep the numbers at a manageable level.
I got a friend request the other day. I didn’t recognize him but I friended him anyway and asked who he is.
As soon as I got the ‘I saw your profile and I just had to get to know you, my dear’, I knew what it was.
The ‘my dear’ gives it away every time.
Well that, the broken English, and the photo of a handsome man, that looks like it was copied from a magazine.
There is nothing in my profile even remotely interesting, and my pic is of my dog.
He wanted to know more about me, so I told him I’m a old, fat, grumpy bitch and there isn’t much else to know. He’s sure I’m just a wonderful person. We chatted a bit more and I mentioned that I’m broke as well. He said who mentioned anything about money, my dear? I said, I just did. I’m broke, can you help me out?
He unfriended me.
Reminds me of the good old days when I could make an obscene phone caller say YOU’RE SICK and hang up on me.
I’ve accepted in the past, and I won’t get fooled again!
Has happened to me just once, or maybe just one of my accidental requests has been accepted. Less embarrassing than yours sounds like, but I am wondering now how many rejections I may be unaware of. Anyway, it would be nice if FB instituted a slight safety, one more click on a different part of the screen, asking something like “do you REALLY want to be friends with this person?”
I once got a real date in this way. But it was an actual real person, friend of friend who saw my profile picture and said he “just had to get to know me”. I suspect because I’m not from this country and he might have thought foreign girls are easy or, who knows, perhaps he did find me hot (I’m okay, but not striking).
I kind of found the move a bit iffy, especially since he never went through the mutual friend - like if you want to chat up people go to Tinder, but as it happens, he was really my type physically so I replied and we did go for a drink and had a short-lived fling. Actually, I never even friended him, we just chatted through messenger.
Just delete them i keep my friend list short and not let to man strangers in.so u dont get spam./
I accidentally sent someone a friend request, and I didn’t think much about it, because I assumed she’d refuse, but she accepted. She has over 300 friends, so she probably accepts everyone, and doesn’t think about where she knows them from.
She actually posts funny stuff sometimes, so it’s all good. We probably have a friend in common.