This is a guest post by Acrimony.

In a game as long-running as World of Warcraft, it’s easy for players’ friend and ignore lists to become overworked and disorganized. This can also be a problem for players with multiple characters, as keeping these lists synchronized across alts is not something automatically handled by the World of Warcraft client; but there are several good addons that can make contact management in Azeroth a lot easier.

Friend and Ignore Share

Vimrasha’s Friend and Ignore Share is a simple, lightweight out-of-the-box addon that maintains friend and ignore lists across multiple characters on the same server seamlessly and without modifying the existing UI. It will also add alts to your friends list for easy mailing. Although it hasn’t been updated in a while, it seems to be working well enough with patch 3.3. A noticeable drawback is that Friend and Ignore Share does not sync friend list character notes across alts.

FriendsWithBenefits

Tekkub’s FriendsWithBenefits is very similar to Friend and Ignore Share in that it syncs friends lists and adds alts without modifying the friend list UI. Although FriendsWithBenefits does not work for ignore lists, it does copy friends list notes across characters.

FriendsShare Resurrection

Kring’s similarly lightweight FriendsShare Resurrection automatically syncs friend and ignore lists, but does not copy over character notes or add alts to the friends list.

myFriends

Schied’s myFriends has friend and ignore list synchronization features as the addons mentioned above, with some additional features to keep lists organized, including an unobtrusive cleanup of the social window UI. MyFriends expands the total number of friends and ignores allowed and adds a "mute" category to the social window for suppressing voice chat from specific players. One of the most unique and useful features of myFriends is allowing the player to create their own categories within the friend and ignore lists. MyFriends copies notes across characters, but it does not add alts to the friend list.

Notes U Need

If the above mentioned addons are comparable to contact managers, Telic’s Notes U Need is akin to a blogging platform with contact management features. The feature list is extensive — not only does Notes U Need cover friend and ignore list synchronization, but it carries associated notes across alts by creating its own database and unobtrusively modifying the social window.

Notes U Need can also be set to automatically create notes for alts, guild members, party members, quests, and NPCs, and you can also create a general note to work on your Arthas/Mal’Ganis/Batman slash fic while waiting for raids to get started. Even a help to programmers, Notes U Need can execute a general note as a LUA script. Notes U Need also sports MapNotes integration for adding an on-the-spot map note without having to open the world map, and supports sending and broadcasting notes to other Notes U Need users.

To support the robust feature set, Notes U Need adds a dock four buttons to the main world view that can be disabled in the addon’s options. About the only advantage that the notebook and pen set I keep on my desk has over Notes U Need is that my notebook doesn’t give me LUA errors when I’m trying to set focus on the tank.