Hmmm…weird. I’m not much for being ‘friends’ with folks on this board. I just don’t get the benefits to be honest: the few ‘friends’ I have here don’t lend me money or offer to babysit my cat when I go on holidays…but anyways 
So after an enforced two-week hiatus (yeah, thanks again for fucking me over Telstra) I returned to the boards yesterday to a ‘Friend Request’ from a name that is unfamiliar to me. Turns out to be a newly registered member with NO posts whatsoever to his/her name.
First, how did he/she find me (I haven’t posted in ages due to the hiatus above). And it’s not like my posts are earth-shattering or insanely funny or anything either. I don’t have a photo of myself anywhere associated with the SDMB…not that a photo would encourage random weirdos to try to ‘friend’ me anyway!
What gives?
I had something similar happen – a friend request from someone I had never seen nor heard of.
Question: If you reject a friend request, does the requester get notified of the fact? I wanted to do so silently, but didn’t know if it worked that way. So I let the request stand, without responding, for about a year.
Eventually, I rejected the request. I don’t know what was wrong with that, but it took me several repeated attempts over several days until the request finally went away.
ETA: P.S.: I also started a thread here in ATMB, asking what useful results come from having a “friend” here, and the answers all seemed to be: “Not much, really.”
There are several threads in ATMB about what’s useful about the friends feature and what requests do or don’t see when approved / denied. A quick search will give you authoritative answers from TPTB.
The short answer, IIRC, is “not much”, and “nothing either way”. vBulletin has many fancier “social” features that aren’t switched on here. “Friends” is the visible tip of that submerged iceberg.