You can easily turn it off by registering a simple plugin hook for the "create" action of river and return it false if the action is a friend creation. You can take a look at the Elgg community customisations plugin.

Sounds great to me, can u friends make a custom plugin for that where users can turn off or ON the optionto from their profile settings?

i'm desiring to have just one entry per friendconnect instead of two, one pointing in each direction..
i think i had that in 1.7 elgg. not in 1.8 yet 

Oh LOLZ, Just noticed this and Soo @shlax If as u say ' Considering that it's that easy,... ' Why on earth have you not already coded this all up for that config panel as a plugin ?

might explain this someone in simple words plz? :)

Since the customization plugin for this community has some alterings i do not want, can i  just copy&paste the "friend-part" (to where?)?

This also disables email & pm-notification message of the friend request plugin.

Why?

Can this plugin be updated? Will not work correctly for me on elgg 1.8.12 and I really would like to be able to get rid of the friends adds on the activity page.

You could comment out line 30 in yourdomain/elgg/actions/friends/add.php if you do not want to wait:

// add_to_river('river/relationship/friend/create', 'friend', elgg_get_logged_in_user_guid(), $friend_guid);

@xsurf would that commenting out work with the 1.9 version of 'Friend request'??

Anyone help with this?