If you’re worried about spamming your friends with game updates on Facebok, here’s how to hide them:
1. You can do this in at least two places. The easiest way to hide ALL of your game updates is to head to your Timeline first. Click on your name, top right side of any Facebook page. Once your Timeline opens, look for the words Activity Log.
From your Timeline, click on the words Activity Log.
2. When your Activity Log opens, all of your activities are shown.
All of your activities are shown here.
3. While you could scroll down and edit each post, we’re here to hide only your game updates. On the left of your screen, look for the list of activities. Normally, Games will be hidden so look for the word ‘More’ and click it:
Look for the word More and click it.
4. Once the menu spreads down, look for the word Games. Click on it.
Click on Games. All updates from all games that you play will show up on the right.
5. On the right side, click on the icon that is second from the right. If could be an icon of a globe, two heads in silhouette or maybe a padlock. Here are your choices:
Choose who sees each game’s updates. In this case, only the Facebook user can see this game’s updates.
6. Once you have set each game’s updates to Only Me, and that is the setting that we recommend, the icon on the far right will be greyed out. Why? Because ALL updates will now be hidden. Do your friends a favor by making sure that each game you play will not spam their newsfeed.
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It seems we’ve been writing about Facebook for longer than Facebook has been around. Judging from the popularity of our “Hiding Likes on Facebook” posts, everyone has something to hide. In this post, which will be a long one, all we’re going to do is post screen captures of as many Facebook menus as we can find. In some photos you won’t see a menu but in the next one, we’ll show you where to find it.
Before we begin, there are two caveats here. First, while we’ll show you how to hide almost everything on Facebook, some of those things may pop up in other areas. Consider the fact that liking a page is different from showing that like later on in a series of your ‘likes’. Liking and showing likes are two different things. For this reason, we suggest that you don’t do something on Facebook that would cause you grief later on in your life or your career.
Secondly, there are two things that you cannot hide on Facebook. First, photos that you post cannot be completely hidden. You can selectively choose who can see the photo but you can’t completely hide it. Think about it. Facebook employees can see the photo, right? Even if the privacy settings for that photo are set to ‘Only Me’, someone at Facebook can see it.
Lastly, you cannot hide mutual friends from anyone. Yes, you can partially hide your friend list but you can’t hide the fact that you have a mutual friend with someone. If being friends with someone will cause problems in your life, especially if that person is a friend of a friend, you can’t hide it. We can see many situations where this would cause a problem so keep this in mind when you’re ‘friending’ someone.
TIP: Why did we say that you could partially hide your friend list? Read this post and you will see why. You can set your friend list’s privacy to ‘Only Me’ but that won’t prevent Facebook from suggesting every one of your friends to someone else. Here’s the link to the post: Stalking Friends on Facebook
Here we go with the screen caps:
Most things that you’ve done are shown on your Activity Log, available from your Timeline.
On the right side of almost all items shown, there is an edit icon which allows you to hide that activity from your Timeline.
TIP: Remember that you can’t hide comments that you make on something that you did not post. Keep that in mind. If you like a photo that someone else posted, you can’t hide it. Same thing for a comment on a photo. You can’t hide that either. All of those things are controlled by the privacy settings that the other person used. Make sure you understand this before you go randomly clicking ‘Like’ on photos or making comments on things posted by other people.
On your Timeline, you can find the edit icon up on the top right of most boxes.
You can check on story types that you have hidden. Seems we haven’t hidden any…yet.
Here, we’ve hidden three types of activity.
Click the arrow to open up all the boxes in your Favourites. Only then can you edit them.
You can swap positions or remove the box from your Favorites.
If the box menu isn’t open, you can’t edit any of the Favorite boxes. Click the arrow just to the right of the 4.
See? Now the Places or Maps box can be edited.
You can check what posts you’ve hidden by looking at your Activity Log and choosing the correct link on the left.
Here is the full list of activities that you can check by clicking More down near the bottom (shown as Less here).
Hide all of your game posts here. Click the Stop Publishing Activity. Please do this for your friends!
Hide all Friending activity here.
Here’s where you can hide your friend list from everyone or from some people, Choose ‘Custom’ to select specific people or lists.
This has been a long post, we know that, but we think you’ll be able to find most of what you’re looking for here. If not, let us know! We love questions.
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Most of us like to play some of the games on Facebook. If you read our last post, you’ll know that you don’t have a lot of privacy when you play these games. We’ve recommended using a dummy account for games but that’s up to you. If you do play games on your main or only Facebook account, here’s how you can adjust a few privacy settings.
1. Go to your Privacy Settings page (top right, click on the little down arrow and choose Privacy Settings.)
2. Look for the words ‘Ads, Apps and Websites’ about 3/4s of the way down the page then click ‘Edit settings’ on the right side.
3. You should be at a page that looks like this:
Here is where we’ll spend some time.
4. Read the top part of this page. You’ll see why we suggest a dummy account for games. Here is the important part:
“On Facebook, your name, profile picture, gender, networks, username and user id (account number) are always publicly available, including to apps (Learn why). Also, by default, apps have access to your friends list and any information you choose to make public.”
Note that your friend list is available to applications and games, even if it is marked ‘only me’ in your custom privacy settings. We’re not sure why a game has to know who your friends are but, hey, that’s Facebook!
5. In the middle of the page you’ll see a short list of apps that you are using. Not all are shown at once so click the words ‘Edit settings’. The next page that comes up will have a complete list of apps that you have allowed to ‘interact with your Facebook account’. In other words, these are the apps that Facebook has shared your most intimate details with. There certainly are a lot of them, aren’t there? Every web page, every game, every little widget that you’ve added to your Facebook account is there.
6. On the right side of every app, there is the word ‘Edit’. Click that and let’s see what you’re sharing with your friends. This is what Social Wars can see on one of our accounts:
We think you should match your settings to these.
7. Every app that you use must be able to access your basic information. This one, Social Wars, says that it has to be able to access your email, too. Not every app requires that but this one does. However, does this Facebook user get emails from Social Wars? No. See down at the bottom where it says ‘When to notify you?’ We’ve set that to ‘Never’.
8. Why cover your Timeline with posts from games? You don’t have to. There will always be some game posts when you look at your own Timeline but you can hide all of these from your friends. Second up from the bottom is the line ‘Posts on your behalf’. Well thanks, Social Wars, but we don’t want you to post crap on our Timeline. Therefore we’ve set that to ‘Only Me’. Only this Facebook user will see Social War’s posts, no one else.
9. We suggest that you work your way down the complete list of apps and change your settings to match ours. You can, of course, adjust each app to your own level of privacy. It takes time but we think it’s worth it.
TIP: Every time you add a game or an app, you’ll have to change these settings for it, right? Remember that.
10. Lastly, on the far right of each app or game you’ll see a little X. That is how you delete the game or app entirely. If you haven’t used something for a while, get rid of it. Some of these apps are temporary, for contests and so on. There is no reason to give them continued access to your private data, is there?
TIP: Even though you have deleted a game or an app, guess what? They still have all of your data. Look at this warning from Facebook regarding a game, Farmville:
Oh no! Farmville (and other games) still have your personal data!
See why we suggest a dummy account for games? Does it makes sense now?
Thanks for reading! Questions and comments are always welcome.
There are several ways to hide your page likes from showing up in your Facebook news feed or on your timeline. We’ve shown you how to hide individual likes in previous posts. This time, we want to show you how to hide groups of things from your timeline.
All of this is done from your own Facebook timeline so head there now. Depending on your settings, you’ll probably see big boxes with titles such as Activity, Friends, Photos, Likes, etc. These big boxes match up with the little boxes with the same names, the ones just below and to the right of your name.
First, lets figure out what boxes we want to share with our friends. Click the small down arrow just to the right of the number of boxes you have in that section. This person has six. This is the box we are looking for:
Click the little box with the number in it. You can’t edit your Favorite boxes until you do.
Once you click on that box, you can edit and shift the various boxes around. Each main box on the second row has an editable icon on the top right, just hover your cursor there. Two boxes do not have edit icons: Friends and Photos. You can hide your full friend list elsewhere but clicking this box will show either your full friend list or mutual friends that you have with whoever is looking at your timeline. Your photo box can’t be hidden or changed but you can, of course, limit your audience to any photo that you post yourself. Any of the other boxes can be swapped with anything else or you can remove that box from your Favorites. (All of these boxes are named Favorites.) Here is a menu of what you can do with the boxes:
Arrange your boxes or remove a box completely. You can add it back later.
If you have removed a box from your Favorite boxes, you can add it back. Hover your cursor on the top right of any blank box on the top row and choose which box you want to add back. Here is the menu you see when you click the edit icon:
Pick a box name and add it back.
Just for fun, here is a glitch that we discovered in this section of the timeline. It looks like a menu where you can type in your own name but, unfortunately, it doesn’t work. This is what we saw:
It would be nice to make up your own name for a Favorite box, wouldn’t it?
Move down the page and find the post that shows that you’ve recently added a friend. Click on the edit button on the top right of that box and you’ll get to hide that whole activity, not just the one single post.
Hide all friending activity with the click of a mouse.
Facebook apps love to post every damn thing you do when you’re playing games. You can hide all posts by any game but, unfortunately, you have to do this game by game. Here’s one of the game menus which allows you to stop them from cluttering your timeline:
Remove all actions. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Work your way down your own timeline and see what you can hide and what you can’t. Each time you do this sort of exercise, you will become more comfortable with maintaining your privacy on Facebook. By nature, Facebook is all about sharing but we think that you should be in control of what you share. We’ll help you all we can to figure it out.
Thanks for reading! Comments, questions, problems are all welcome. Follow us on Facebook to get the latest updates. Here the link: Computers Made Simple
Some Facebook friends are just too active, right? Your newsfeed is full of ‘X did this’ and ‘X did that’. Here’s how you can stop those updates from making it to your Facebook newsfeed.
1. Go to your troublesome friend’s timeline. Hover your mouse over the word ‘Friends’. This is what you’ll see:
Hovering on the word ‘Friends’ will bring out this menu.
2. On the menu that pops out, look for the word Settings, as shown here:
Settings is the one you want on this menu.
3. Click the word ‘Settings’ to bring up this menu:
Choose which updates you want to receive.
4. From the list, choose which updates you want to receive. If you’re getting spammed with game updates, make sure that the ‘Games’ word is unchecked.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
