Friends List Categories

There is a group of people that see value in sometimes interacting with, and sometimes following provisional players, in order to improve their Lichess experience.

Having one big massive friends list with everyone jumbled together makes this organization impossible.

Would it be possible to section off everyone into separate lists?

"Provisional"
"Students"
"Admins"
"Friends"
"GMs"
etc.

This does not make sense-because there is no such list of friends

How would that work if lists intersect ("Friends" and "GMs")?

Either they are in both lists or in the last one added to.

@Toadofsky
1. It is well known that grandmasters don't have friends ;)
2. Wouldn't it be possible to include players in both groups? So that you can find the player under both "friends" and "GMs"?

@Shiaxou 2. Perhaps (I don't know) although if many friends are repeated among many groups, potentially the friends list might scroll.

And how about a list of tags for each contact and filter by one or several tags?

@toadofsky #3

If the lists intersect, just "last-added" would be fine, or whatever is easiest.
Anything to help organize the "Following" page would be useful. 'Add a note', 'categories'...

But what about simply being able to colour-code the names on your 'Following' page?

That would be perfect for intents and purposes and it's probably the easiest to implement.

Alternately, being able to 'de-select' who shows up on the live "Online Friends" menu, would be the perfect solution as well.

-

I follow 3 groups of people:

1. Friends/Family/StudyBuddies/GMs
2. Lichess Protagonists
3. Provisional Newcomers (Welcome Wagon)

Any way to distinguish #3 from the others, is all that's needed.
(#3 will be regularly unfollowed, hence the reason for the post.)

-

At the end of the day, Toad, if it's not super easy to implement, then don't even sweat it for a second.

@Onyx_Chess No worries and good discussion! Normally in the forum I do any of:
a) Add good ideas to the issue tracker (the enormous to-do list), maybe even advocate among the Lichess developers if there's an especially good idea (in my opinion)
b) Ignore uninteresting ideas
c) Dismiss complex or uninteresting ideas

... but here I struggled since the idea (tagging and filtering contacts) is both good and complex, so advocating for it is an uphill battle. This is exactly the user story I was searching for (concrete enough that we know what the user wants, but flexible enough that developers can design something that fits into Lichess):

"I follow 3 groups of people:

1. Friends/Family/StudyBuddies/GMs
2. Lichess Protagonists
3. Provisional Newcomers (Welcome Wagon)

Any way to distinguish #3 from the others, is all that's needed.
(#3 will be regularly unfollowed, hence the reason for the post.)"
github.com/ornicar/lila/issues/5017