The Ultimate Member Friends extension records connection requests and accepted friendships either in a dedicated table (um_friends in many installs) or as usermeta rows with paired keys depending on extension version. Each row carries the two user IDs involved, request state (pending, accepted, blocked), and a created-at timestamp. The Ultimate Member profile data for both users lives in wp_users and wp_usermeta.

The default Friends admin handles requests as a per-user list. Cross-graph views (every pending request older than 7 days for cleanup, every newly approved account with no connections after 30 days, every account with an unusually high friend count for anti-spam) require custom SQL. Filtering connection state by both sides' Ultimate Member account_status isn't a built-in screen.

SleekView reads the friend rows directly, joins wp_users twice (once per side) for both emails and display names, and pivots Ultimate Member usermeta into columns. The result is a flat connection table where request state, both sides' profile attributes, and per-user friend counts are filterable together.

A friend graph is a quiet system until it isn't. Most days the connections build silently, and operators don't think about them. The moment that changes is usually a spam wave (an account opens, fires off a hundred requests, gets approved by a few unwary recipients) or an onboarding investigation (why are newly approved members leaving in the first month).

Both are graph-level questions, and both are invisible in the default Ultimate Member Friends admin because that UI is built around the per-user request inbox. The data is there, because every connection row has both sides, a state, and a timestamp. The gap is composition.

SleekView's pivot turns the graph into a flat table where both sides' Ultimate Member account state lives next to the request, and per-user connection rollups expose pattern accounts at a glance. Moderators get the anti-spam queue, community managers get the onboarding rollup, support gets the per-user debug view. For any community where Friends is on, that's the difference between catching graph-level problems early and learning about them from user complaints.