Category Archives: Timeline

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Timeline

Avoid Being Embarrassed on Facebook – turn on Timeline review

September 12, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

We’ve all been there. Some fun-loving friend tags you in a questionable post or photo that seems hilarious to them but not to you. Here’s how to prevent your other Facebook friends, and complete strangers, from seeing these annoying posts.

1. From any Facebook page, click on the icon on the top right to bring down this menu:

Photo of Timeline Review 1 — **Click the down arrow then choose Settings.**

2. Clicking Settings brings up this menu, you want Timeline and Tagging:

Photo of Timeline Review 2 — **Timeline and Tagging next.**

3. On the page that comes up, you can adjust everything that pertains to your Timeline; who can post, who can see the posts and whether you can review these things before anyone else sees them.

Photo of Timeline Review 3 — **Spend some time on this menu to fine tune your privacy settings. Do this before you get a surprise post that may affect your life.**

Make sure you enable ‘Review posts before they appear on your timeline’.

4. As with just about everything else on Facebook, there is a disclaimer. Read this carefully:

Photo of Timeline Review 4 — **These settings will keep things off your Timeline but they’re still visible elsewhere. Huh?**

Make sure you’re clear on everything in this friendly message from Facebook. We’re wondering what ‘other places on Facebook’ means.

5. See the setting at the top of the photo above? It reads ‘Who can post on your timeline?’. You’d want that set to Friends, obviously. Once you do that, you’re allowing anyone who is on your friend list to post comments, photos and videos on your timeline. The question we’d ask you is this: “Do you know all of your Facebook friends personally?” If not, you’d better make sure that only you can see the things that are posted.

Photo of Timeline Review 5 — **Make sure that only you can see what your friends post.**

We have ours set to ‘Only Me’. Once we see what has been posted, we can share it or delete it. Read step 7.

6. You can fine tune this setting. It allows you to hide posts from certain groups of friends or open everything up to everyone. To narrow down the visibility of posts, you have to make lists of friends or identify some friends as ‘Close Friends’. Once you set this to Friends or Custom, for instance, you can always go back to your Activity Log and ‘unhide’ some things that you think everyone might like to see.

7. Change the settings of the things that are set to ‘Only Me’ on your Activity Log. Here are your choices:

Photo of Timeline Review 7 — **Allow it, highlight it, delete it, you can even change the date!**

All of these settings should keep you from being surprised the next time you open your Facebook page. You have to realize that your standards of what’s right and what’s offensive are very likely different from some or all of your friends. As you know, these standards vary greatly when alcohol is involved! Make sure you’re protected from ‘NSFW’ (not suitable for work) posts,pics and comments on your Timeline.

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Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Layered Privacy, Timeline

Facebook – control posts on your timeline

March 19, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

Have you ever something posted on your Facebook Timeline that wasn’t appropriate? Something that upset you? Have you recently been tagged in some crazy photo or video? Here’s how to stop things like this from ruining your day.

1. Head over to your Account Settings:

**Click on the gear (settings) then Account Settings.**

2. Click on Timeline and Tagging:

Photo of Privacy 2 — **Timeline and Tagging.**

3. Click on the word Edit up on the right. Start at the top and work down.

Click on Edit.

4. Who can add things to my Timeline? You can choose to block all of your friends. Unfortunately, you can’t block only some of your friends. It’s all or nothing.

Photo of Privacy 4 — **Tough decision here, right?**

5. If you choose to allow your friends to post on your Facebook Timeline, make sure you also choose to review those posts:

Photo of Privacy 5 — **Review posts before they show up on your Timeline. Read the warning note, though.**

TIP: Make sure you read the note in the photo above, the one that says that nothing is private on Facebook. Quote: Note: This only controls what’s allowed on your timeline. Posts you’re tagged in still appear in search, news feed and other places on Facebook.

6. Limit visibility of posts that you’ve been tagged in:

Photo of Privacy 6 — **Set this to ‘Only Me’. No one else has to see the posts, right?**

7. Continue on down the list and edit each one so that they match your own level of security and privacy. Here is an important one:

Photo of Privacy 7 — **Make sure you review tags on your own posts BEFORE they show up on your Timeline.**

We hope this tour of your Timeline privacy settings helps you keep unwanted posts and tags off your Facebook page. Remember that you can block someone who posts troublesome things on your Timeline. Choose your friends wisely, right?

Thanks for reading!

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Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Timeline

Facebook Likes – The Ultimate Guide – Part Four

August 31, 2012 Computers Made Simple 5 Comments

This post is strictly for your Likes, the ones that your Like box is linked to. Go to your Facebook timeline and click on the Like box. This is that page that will pop up:

Photo of Like editing page — **See the word Edit up on the top right? Click it.**

The next page, after you click the Edit button, looks like this:

Photo of Editing your Likes 2 — ***This is where you choose what to show and what to hide.***

This is a long page, starting with your Favorites. (The photo reads Favourites because we’re in Canada and use the British spelling.) Your page of Likes is made up of both your favorites as well as the pages you like. The pages are all at the bottom. Right now, let’s look at the Music box. You can do two things with each favorite. You can show it or hide it. If you decide to show it, you can choose who you want to see it or who you want to hide it from, the same as if you post a photo on Facebook.

Once you decide who you want to share this favorite box with, you’re left with showing them every type of music you like. You can’t break up this box into pieces, say Techno being one piece that you don’t mind showing and Andy Williams being another piece that you don’t want to show. If you show your music to anyone, they see all of the music you like. If you want to hide old Andy, you have to hit the X beside their name to delete it.

The same applies to all of the topics that Facebook thinks should be listed as Favorites, whether they be books, TV, movies or whatever. If you want to hide your Favorites from someone or only show them to a group of friends, click on the icon on the right. That will bring up this menu:

Photo of Favorite share menu — ***Sort out this menu as best you can. This applies to the particular favorite you are working on, not every single one of them.***

You can see from the photo above that you can hide a particular favorite from some people but you can’t hide only one of those individual items unless you hide the whole group of favorites. Get it? If you like Madonna in your Music favorites and you show your Music favorites to your friends, you can’t hide the fact that Madonna is in that group.

Useless Favorites Tip: These favorites are really useless in the whole scheme of things to share on Facebook. The only reason they are even on your timeline is to open yourself up a bit to your friends. You may have an acquaintance who knows a bit about you but they didn’t know that you like Bladerunner (a movie). Once they find out that you like something, they have a fuller picture of you as a person and, possibly, might feel better about chatting with you about similar interests. Having a favorite in this group doesn’t mean that you’ll get inundated with offers or emails or updates on anything. These favorites are just there in order for people to get to know you better. Hide them, show them, it doesn’t matter.

Let’s move on to items that actually get updated every now and then, Facebook pages. As you know, Facebook pages are full of information, updates as well as photos and links, all pertaining to the person or company that created the page. Virtually every star, celebrity or company has a Facebook page. If they don’t, they’re missing the boat.

Facebook Page Likes – Options Available

As far as Facebook page likes go, you can hide them or show them as a group. Yes, you can show or hide them all to whatever group of friends you choose but you cannot hide one of the pages and show the others. This is the same as your other favorites, it’s all or nothing. All means every page you like will be shown to whoever you show any page you like. You can’t pick and choose what to show.

If you like a page, only you will see the updates and information that this page feeds out. No one else will see anything that a page feeds out to you unless they follow the same page.

TIP: There is no reason to show anyone what pages you like. Why not hide all of the pages you like? That way you won’t slip up. Close friends, relatives, employers and employees don’t have to know what pages you follow, do they? Instead of tripping up at some point as you try to keep track of who can see what, why not just shut out everyone? Makes sense to us. Once you lock your page likes from everyone, you are free to be yourself. We advise you to set your Page Likes to this setting:

Photo of perfect privacy setting — **Set this page to ‘Only me’ and feel free to ‘like’ any page you bloody well want to! Yay freedom!**

We’re done. Over the last few posts we’ve tried to sort out everything about Facebook like boxes, Facebook likes and, finally, Facebook page likes. We hope things are a bit clearer now for you. Questions, comments, all are welcome. Good luck!

Thanks for reading!

Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Timeline

Facebook Likes – The Ultimate Guide – Part Two

August 28, 2012 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

Let’s take a look at our Facebook Likes and see what we can do with them. When someone visits you on Facebook, they see your timeline, of course. What we’re going to do is take a look at what they see, not what you see. You can hide things from your friends but you can’t hide things from yourself. (That’s actually quite a pithy statement, isn’t it?)

Tip: To get the most out of our articles, set yourself up with another Facebook account. Do that now. Add yourself as a friend and open the new account in another browser (not the same browser you are using now). Go to your timeline in your new profile where you are a friend and get used to using the refresh button to see what affect the changes you make on your other profile have as your friends see it. You are editing one account in one browser and checking out the results in another account that is open in another browser. Get it? Yes, you can use the ‘view as’ button but that isn’t as fast as using a separate Facebook profile.

Here is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. The first photo is from the original person’s profile. The second one is how a friend sees the same profile. Note that the ‘Likes’ are different.

Photo of likes menu — **The two ‘likes’ show in this photo are hidden from everyone but are visible to the profile owner.**

Now that you can see why it is valuable to have two profiles, let’s get back to work. The next step is to show you the difference between sharing and allowing things to be seen on your timeline. So far, all of this has to do with YOUR stuff and YOUR actions. We’ll get into your various interactions later.

Your Facebook timeline is a constantly evolving record of what you do on Facebook. As long as you stick to simply sharing things, you can hide that from others, all or some or none. As we showed you in our last post, you choose whom you want to share your own stuff with. That post is here: Ultimate Guide Part One . Today, we’ll deal with your timeline and show you how to use its edit feature.

There are two ways, at least, to keep things off of your timeline. Let’s deal with your Activity log first. Head to your own timeline, click on your profile pic up on the top right then click on Activity log. The next page that opens is a long list of things you’ve done recently. Each of those things can be edited, depending on what it is. Two more pics will explain this better.

Photo of Activity log — **This item is something that someone else posted. Hovering our cursor over the circle icon, we can see that it is allowed on our timeline.**

In the photo above, there is a comment on something that was posted on someone’s profile. It is allowed on the timeline. How do we get it off the timeline?

Photo of Activity log 2 — **Because we commented on someone else’s post, we can ONLY delete the comment. That is the only way to get it off of our timeline.**

We can only delete the comment. Yes, this is going over the same stuff as our last post but we feel that we have to reinforce this concept. Let’s deal with something that we did. Facebook is more forgiving with things that you post yourself.

Photo of a photo — **This album is, for now, allowed on the timeline.**

Photo of another photo — **If you click on the circle, you can perform several actions as far as your timeline is concerned.**

If you put something up on Facebook, you can hide it from your timeline. It sounds simple but we think it gets a bit confusing (and frustrating) for some of you.

TIP: When you share something with some of your friends but not all of them, the former can see it on your timeline but the latter can’t. If you hide something from your timeline, you are hiding it from EVERYONE. More on this in the next post.

Thanks for reading!

a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun