Saturday, November 20, 2010

Facebook: What happened to hide all posts from this game?

Facebook now allows us to download all of our personal information in one zip archive (Account:Account Settings: Download Your Information). That's good.

On the other hand, I realized today I can't block game posts any more.

Until recently when I moused over a Facebook "app" generated game posts generated by a friend's game use, I would see a small "X" to the right of the post. Clicking on that produced a list of options like:

  • Hide this post
  • Hide all by Joe
  • Hide all posts from this application (roughly)

Now I only see the first two. I can either hide a single post (pointless), or I can hide all from "Joe" (not what I want). I can't hide all posts from, say, "farmville".

Now I'm seeing Facebook App posts in my news stream - for the first time in a year.

Games are how Facebook makes its money. Even so, this surprises me. I wonder if it's a technical glitch ...

Update: Some game related posts from today still have the "Hide All ..." option. I wonder if some app vendors are trying to bypass FB's "Hide All" feature.

Update 11/21/10: Per comments this has been going on for weeks. I don't think it's a glitch. Strange that there's been abundant coverage of FB minor events, but none of this much bigger change. I'm going to have to start hiding all posts from my friends who use FB Apps that publish activity.

4 comments:

Martin said...

I have noticed the same issue for some weeks, not just for games BTW, the issue is also reproducible for all these annoying surveys … as a short-time solution, I simply block 'friends' whose postings have become a tad too annoying.

JGF said...

Thanks Martin. So it's not a simple glitch.

I wonder if FB has changed the rules, or if game vendors are cheating.

I'm also going to start blocking friends who play games.

Martin said...

My wife noticed the problem too. In case of most other websites, you could just ask the webmaster and get a reliable answer. In case of Facebook, it is just guessing since there is no easily available human contact.

(And I should read my comments before clicking on 'PUBLISH YOUR COMMENT' …)

m0r5k said...

You guys, just press hide the post. then another option appears where the message used to be asking if you wanna hide all by...or just this one.

got it?