Buddy List

Buddy lists are exactly what they say on the tin: lists of buddies. Adding one-another to a buddy list is an excellent way of keeping in contact with close friends, allies, and yes, business partners. Buddies can check each other's status through the built in locator feature. This raises privacy concerns, of course, because buddies know where each other are all the time.

How it Works
When a penguin hatches, it is given a buddy list along with a player card when they register and receive their birth certificate. When a penguin recives a friend request in their mailbox and accepts, their buddy list logs the penguin's name and adds statuslights to indicate what your buddy is doing, which it does by connecting to the BoF's supercomputers (G declines this and says it is connected to his computer network. It has been confirmed this is what G originally planned and still thinks.)

If a penguin's buddy list has more than the visible amount of penguins, the penguin can scroll the wheel on the back up or down to see more buddies.

Signals and their meanings
There are three different signals on a buddy list.


 * Happy Face - The penguin is active and in a trackable location.


 * Blue Face - The penguin is not active, is sleeping, or is in a place that can not be listed on the details screen, either because it's a secret, little known, too far away, or simply has not been added to the known registry of places a buddy can be.


 * Star - The penguin has added themselves to their buddy list (see below)

Adding oneself to the buddy list
Those with egos can add one's self to their own buddy list. This has been done before. In the event of this, the list's owner will see a star by their name.

Buddy list cases

 * Main article: United States of Antarctica Courts of Buddies' Redress

Over the years, thousands of court cases have been filed regarding buddy lists, buddy list regulation, and privacy concerns and issues arising from buddy lists. Generally speaking, most of these cases are dismissed because it was the fault of the user. If one doesn't want to be tracked by a fellow penguin, they shouldn't have added them to a buddy list.

Seeing this problem, the South Pole Council crafted a bill, passed in 2007, that authorized a series of courthouses given exclusive jurisdiction over any and all cases pertaining to buddy lists. There are five of these "buddy courts" in each State, each distributed geographically, that all appeal into one federal "Superior Buddy Tribunal" mandatorily (that is, the SBT has to accept all appeals).

In the judicial world of buddy lists, the buck stops at the Superior Buddy Tribunal. Since there is only one appeal above the buddy courts, and since this court has to accept all cases that are filed towards it, the judges in the SBT are some of the most overworked judges in Antarctica, with a case load three times as big as the actual Supreme Courts of Antarctica. The judges tend to work fourteen hour shifts to hear all the cases. Their pay stinks, too.

Trivia

 * Oddly, buddy lists can find people in Owcatraz, THE SKIP, and the Bureau of Fiction.
 * X-Antibodies have buddy lists, but rarely use them.
 * The exception is Mabel X, who constantly expands her list and adds everyone.
 * Kermit's buddy list is the only known buddy list that has a broken friend counter because of how many friends he has.