Your friends list not only lists people who are your online community friends, but also allows you to further limit your interactions in the forums to just these people in two areas: private messaging your Visitor Messages (what's publicly displayed on your Profile page). You can specify to receive only PMs and/or Visitor Messages from any other member, or just those members on your friends & contacts list (and the community support team).

You can change these settings in "Edit Options" in your Profile: https://psychcentralforums.com/profi...do=editoptions

Hope this helps clarify things. If you don't want to use the friends & contacts list, you don't have to. It's completely optional.