Sorry for posting such a stupid, basic question (even more so in appearance since I’ve been around for a little while now) but what is a friend request and what happens if one accepts one?
Funny, snarky replies welcomed, as long as I eventually get the answer I seek.
Really, not much. Kinda like real life.
They will ask you to lend them $20 until “next Tuesday.”
Seriously, the answer is “not much.”
You get the warm fuzzies of having a friend on the internet.
As was already said, the short answer is “not much”. The slightly longer answer is that there are some features related to friends and contacts, but they aren’t used by most users here.
If you go to your user control panel (User CP on the upper left), you can then to to Profile Privacy and set each section for who can see what. You might want to put some things on your profile that only your “friends” can see, for example.
You can also restrict PMs so that you only receive PMs from friends or contacts. You will still receive PMs from moderators or admins no matter how you set your options. The options are under Edit Options in your user control panel.
There are some other friend and contact options in vBulletin (the software we use) but we don’t have most of those features enabled. For example some versions of vBulletin allow users to create blogs. I don’t think that’s in our version of vBulletin, but if it is and we had it enabled, you could set your own blog so that only your friends could read it. We either don’t have that feature or it’s disabled, so it doesn’t matter for us.
I don’t know – accept mine and find out? Other than being a Mumper I’m fairly stable ---- by SDMB standards of course. 
All I know is, you’re the Cadillac of worms (beep, beep).
Friends?
W the KRP