I haven't seen any settings in the Admin section that I can activate. Seems to me there should be some advantage to the feature, but I haven't seen one.
@Cyber_Liberty
I would go to the documentation online and lookup 'buddy list' to see what the original developers thought the purpose of it was.
Possibly even call or email the developing company customer service line and ask them about it. There may be a way to alter the source code to make 'buddy list' more productive. And if they can send a notification to buddies, then they should be able to notify posters whenever someone responds to something they posted without having to specify @xxx, like TOS does now.
Not suggesting you do this. I'm only pointing out that in my history of coding, that is how I handled things like this. And more times than not, it worked. Even if it doesn't exist now, they put my suggestions in the next upgrade. It was routine. Happened all the time.