I'm not aware of anything where you can select which ones to show.  There are plugins available that have hard-coded rule sets for what to show and what not to.

eg. http://community.elgg.org/plugins/873270/1.1/river-privacy-18x

that 'so-and-so' made friends w/ 'so-and-so' is quite an unnecesary 3/4 'useless' pain in the tail ;-P isn't it ?? go to the plugin that handles the 'made friends' logic, find the add to river code and comment it out ;oO all those 'made friends w/.. ; will go away from the river!

Thanks for the fast replies :-)

Do you have any hints where I can find the responsible plugin and it's river code?

paste here - your actual river 'made friends..yadda..yadda.. ' message  ++ the elgg version#

You can create a plugin hook for the river creation event

elgg_register_plugin_hook_handler('creating', 'river', 'skip_river_updates');
function skip_river_updates($hook, $type, $item) {
$view = $item['view'];
switch ($view) {
// remove group join updates
case 'river/relationship/member/create':
return false;
break;
//remove creating friendship
case 'river/relationship/friend/create':
return false;
break;
}
}

Thanks a lot! Great Community!

GreaT work, this will help definately with performance as well of the river page load.

I do wonder though, why not have all activity plugins added the standard option in the settings to update the river or not? Seems that there's a 'standard' used with the create / delete so why not with the river update?