VI. Making Friends with Fellow Witches and Wizards in Pottermore
In This Section
• Invite People to Be Your Online Friends
• Accept Incoming Friend Requests
• How to Interact with Your Pottermore Friends
• How to Find New Pottermore Friends
• Show Others What You Like About Pottermore
After the Sorting Hat places you within Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, or Slytherin, you become part of that house, and one of your goals is to earn as many house points as you can for your house. During your visits to Pottermore, however, you can also keep tabs on the progress of your housemates and your other online friends within Pottermore.
After you’ve added someone as your friend within Pottermore, you can exchange gifts or challenge others to a Wizard’s Duel.
Invite People to Be Your Online Friends
Inviting people to be your online friend is easy. From the gateway along the top of the screen, click the Friends icon. The first time you do this, you see this message: You don’t have any friends on Pottermore yet. If you know someone, why not add that person as a friend?
Within the empty field just below this message, enter someone else’s Pottermore username, and then click the Add Friends button.
The only way to make contact with other people within Pottermore is by using their username, not their muggle name. It’s important that you never reveal your real name to the people you interact with online as you post public comments. When you post a comment, everyone on Pottermore can read it.
As soon as you enter someone’s username, the Pottermore website locates that person and displays his username, animal avatar (pet), his house, when he joined Pottermore, how many house points he’s earned, and what country he’s from. If a green dot appears near the icon for his animal avatar, this indicates the person is currently online (and potentially available for a Wizard’s Duel). Click the Add as a Friend button to confirm that you want to add this person as your friend.
If you enter a valid username for someone, a Friend Found message appears. Click the Add as a Friend button below the person’s username.
A Friend Request is then sent to the other person. When the other person approves your request, you and he then become online friends. After you’ve added at least one friend, a listing of your friends shows whenever you click the Friends icon.
Accept Incoming Friend Requests
When you look up at the gateway and notice that a Number icon has appeared to the right of the Messenger Owl perched on the Spells icon, this means you have new notifications. (The number indicates how many notifications you have waiting.)
Click the owl to see your Notifications. If a Your Friend Requests message appears under the Friends heading, either click the Go to Friend button on the Notifications screen or click the Friends icon within the gateway to accept your new friend requests.
After clicking the Messenger Owl, you’re notified when you have new friend requests.
As you’re looking at your list of new friend requests, for each request you have the option of clicking the green Accept button to accept the friend request or clicking the red Ignore button to ignore the request.
If you click the Accept button for a friend request, that person immediately becomes your online friend and appears on your Friends list.
How to Interact with Your Pottermore Friends
While looking at your Friends list, you see three buttons under each person’s username: Challenge, Send Gift, and Remove Friend. If you want to challenge that person to a Wizard’s Duel, click the Challenge button.
As you’re viewing your Friends list after clicking the Friends icon, just under each friend’s username is an option to Add Nickname. If you click this option, you’re given the chance to type in your own nickname for that person. Here, you can enter their real-life name, if you know it. Doing this helps you keep track of the identities of your real-life friends within Pottermore.
The friends listed on your Friends list display in alphabetic order based on their Pottermore username. However, if you manually enter a nickname for each friend, you can then click the View By option near the top-right corner of the Friends screen and select Nickname. By doing this, your Friends list is re-sorted and displayed alphabetically based on the nicknames you’ve created for each of your friends.
If you become friends with a lot of people on Pottermore, your list of friends will get long. To quickly move around this list, click the letter tabs along the right side of the Friends list. If you click the letter O, for example, and your friends are being sorted by their username, all your friends whose usernames begin with the letter O are displayed.
To access your Friends list at anytime, click the Friends icon within the gateway. You can also access your profile page and then scroll down to the center of it where you see the Friends heading. Click the View and Manage button. Or when you receive a new friend request, click the Messenger Owl, and then click the Go to Friends button.
When looking at your Friends list, you can challenge someone to a Wizard’s Duel, send a gift, or remove someone as a friend.
See Section IV, “Wizard’s Duels: Enhance Your Spell-Casting Skills,” to discover strategies for becoming an expert when it comes to casting spells and winning duels. Remember, for every duel you win, you earn house points.
Although you cannot send private emails or instant messages to other Pottermore users, you can post public comments that your friends are able to read. A comment can include your thoughts, ideas, or boasts about your achievements.
Be sure to see Section VII, “Your Adventure Continues,” for more information about posting comments on Pottermore.
How to Find New Pottermore Friends
One way to find new friends is to read the chapter summary screen each time you complete a chapter. From these screens, you have the Add a Comment option. When you post a comment, everyone else is able to read it. It’s also possible to read comments posted by other people.
You can post a comment from numerous other screens within Pottermore and read other persons’ comments. For example, you can scroll down toward the bottom of the Great Hall, the Common Room, or any description for a character, place, book or creature, and post or read comments on these pages as well. The person’s username who posted each comment is always shown.
As you’re reading other peoples’ comments, their Pottermore username is highlighted in yellow. Click a username to view her profile page. Then, near the top center of her profile page, her username, online status, how long she’s been a Pottermore member, and her country are shown. Just below this information is an Add as a Friend button.
Anytime you see someone’s username displayed anywhere within Pottermore, you can also hover your mouse over it to display a small pop-up information box. This box includes that person’s username, online status, avatar animal, house, when she joined Pottermore, how many house points she’s earned, and what country she’s from. An Add as a Friend button is also shown.
Click the Add as a Friend button that appears on someone’s profile page to send him a friend request, even if you don’t know that person in real life. You can become friends with other people from your house or with people from other houses. When it comes to participating in Wizard’s Duels, you want to challenge people from other houses; otherwise, it’s just considered practice.
Whenever you visit the Common Room, on the right side of the screen is a leader board that displays the Pottermore users who have earned the most house points for your house. Click a username to view another person’s profile page, and then click the Add as a Friend button to send that person a friend request.
When you visit the Great Hall by clicking the Great Hall icon within the gateway, you see leader boards for each house that displays the Pottermore users who have earned the most house points for their house. Click any of the usernames you see displayed to view their profile page, and then click the Add as a Friend button to send a friend request.
One reason why you might want to become online friends with those who have earned their way onto a Pottermore leader board is so that you can challenge them to Wizard’s Duels and enhance your skills as a witch or wizard.
Sending and Receiving Gifts
One thing you can do while viewing your Friends list is to send other people gifts. To do this, click the Send Gift button under someone’s username. When you click the Send Gift button, a Send a Gift to a Friend pop-up window appears.
The name of the person you’ve selected to send the gift also shows within the pop-up window. From the pull-down menu, select what type of gift you want to send. Your have these gift options:
• Objects
• Chocolate frog cards
• Books
• Potion ingredients
• Cauldrons
After you choose a gift category, a list of related items that are currently stored in your trunk (that you’ve collected or purchased) display. Click what you want to send, and then click Send Gift.
You can also send a gift directly from your trunk. To do this, click the Trunk icon within the gateway. As you view the contents of your trunk, items that you can send as a gift have a Send as Gift button below them. Click this button to send the item. When you do this, a pop-up window shows the gift you’ve selected. From the Choose a Friend pull-down menu, select which friend you want to send the gift to, and then click Send Gift.
When you send gifts, recipients receive a notification from the Messenger Owl on their screen. What you sent as a gift is automatically removed from your trunk and placed into their trunk.
Likewise, if someone sends you a gift, you receive a notification from the Messenger Owl, and the gift that was sent appears within your trunk automatically. You can then access that gift by clicking the Trunk icon within the gateway.
Don’t give away objects, chocolate frog cards, books, potion ingredients, or cauldrons that you might need for you own adventure or to brew your own potions, unless you have duplicates or the ability to purchase replacements from Diagon Alley.
Because you might need some items you find during your adventure within Book 1 as you progress through later parts of Pottermore, it’s a good strategy to give away only those items you can easily replace with a trip back to Diagon Alley, such as potion ingredients, as long as you have enough galleons.
Show Others What You Like About Pottermore
Displayed on the chapter introduction and chapter summary screens (as well as within descriptions for everything under the Read About section and on all the items you find during your adventure), you see a Like button with a thumbs-up icon displayed along with it.
Click the Add to Favorites button or the Like option when you discover something interesting in Pottermore.
Click the Like option to add whatever you’re viewing to the list of things you especially like about Pottermore. You can also view how many other people also like the same thing as you.
In addition to using the Like option, it’s easy to create and maintain your own detailed list of your favorite things about Pottermore. To do this, click the Add to Favorites button whenever you encounter something you really like. When you do this, that character, creature, place, object, potion, spell, or chapter (location) is added to your Favorites list.
Click the Favorites icon within the gateway to view your Favorites list, which is sorted by category. Click a category tab to view what you’ve added as a favorite within that category.
When someone views your profile page, they can see the things that you have selected as your favorites under the Favorites heading. Likewise, when you look at other people’s profile pages, you can see what they have selected as their favorite elements of Pottermore as well.
Keep in mind that you can send gifts, challenge friends to a Wizard’s Duel, post comments, or “like” various aspects of Pottermore at anytime during your adventure. You can also click any of the unlocked gateway icons to transport yourself to places like Diagon Alley, Gringotts, the Great Hall, or the Common Room.