h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Im with Icy, I make sure I actually know them first before friending them, including half my family that I don't talk to in real life, so why would I want to see photos of their newest offspring who is just as mutated ugly as they are?

Although if my brother keeps posting nothing but every single video he watches on youtube, and he seems to spend all day watching videos, I may have to start removing people.

Blocking people on twitter however, I do that regularly. Im not after having loads of followers, cant be bothered with it. So I will happily keep blocking people there

"Can I also block all the posts that tell me they have become a master virtualcheesecake maker, scored 1 billion on bejewelled, or need somebody to help water their virtual potato fields?"

Yes, just click the x on the status and you can choose what bits to hide.

I have unfriended people who constantly use bad language, but usually those people are 'friends of friends' I've been introduced to in case we get on - usually men!

I unfriended a friend because she's in the 'glamour' world and kept posting up pictures I didn't want to share with my son, who could see my screen from where he was sitting. That error has been corrected now and I refriended her but she's set up a list or a page or something and only publishes to people who ask to go on that list so it's all worked out lovely. She got fed up of not having any friends because so many of us have kids!

Otherwise I just unfriend people because they've just added me because I've posted on a mutual friend's comment, or they're from (funnily enough) h2g2 but never actually talk to me either on FB or on here. So then it's bye bye!

Pastey, you've illustrated your own flaw there.

One one hand, you have Facebook-friended your brother, who turns out to be an irritating internet lout.

On the other hand, with no vetting process, I Facebook-friended a girl I didn't particularly like at Uni, mostly because she spent a lot of time being an awkward gooseberry in complicated love triangles, and she turns out to be a poetic and witty doctor of sub-atomic physics, who has THE most interesting life and thoughts of anyone I know.

Your loss.

Dammit, I want one of those.

I friended my auntie and all my cousins. All fine for a year or two. Then auntie starts a business doing ante-natal classes. All fine, good luck with that.

Then I get updates and messages from her - "Please 'like' my new website". OK, fair enough, I'll check it out later. Then I get the same message from her daughter... and all three of her sons. And two of their friends I've friended. OK, OK, I'll look at the website.

So I go and look at it. It's riddled with spelling errors, grammatical errors, run on sentences, and sentences that start and then just

In a particularly egregious point, it talks at one stage about the benefits of "ante-natel" classes.

So in a spirit of trying to be helpful, I message back that the site design is good, the graphics are good, the layout is good, but the text, and specifically the text on the front page, which is the first impression anyone will get of this business proposition, needs spell/grammar checking.

There's no response. Then a couple of days later, I get deluged with messages again asking me to 'like' this new website. "Oh," I think, "they must have fixed the text." I go to check it out. Nothing has changed. I message again about spell checking, and get a message back saying she doesn't know how to work the spell checker.

I shake my head in disbelief... but in a spirit of being as helpful as possible, I copy the text off the site, correct the spelling, grammar and structure, and send the corrected copy to my auntie so she can simply paste it into her site.

No response.

A day or so later, ANOTHER torrent of "Please like this new site" messages. Thinking they surely must have fixed it by now, I go to check it out. NOTHING has changed. So I ignore the messages.

At this point, I get a message saying "why haven't you looked at it?". OK, I've tried to be polite. I've tried to be helpful. I've tried to be nice, and subtle. And all I've got is an inbox full of worthless crap.

So in response, I simply posted "Would you pay for ante-natal classes from someone who couldn't spell 'ante-natal'?".

I was thinking this might cause some embarrassed admission of error. Oh no - what I got was indignant emails asking how I could be so rude. Emails saying how dare I be so nasty. And in one case, a text message from a person with history of charges for violent disorder threatening to knock on my door and commit physical violence to my person if I were ever so rude to their mother again.

On that basis, that particular portion of my family has been unfriended.



Oh, and I unfriended a guy I met on holiday because most of his status updates are in Turkish. I don't think he was offended.

Icy said >>>>


All my friends have to undergo developed vetting before I even invite them.
<<<

I am in that camp - but if I have overlooked any of my dear h2g2 friends, it's probably because I don't recognise your real-life version, so sorry. . .


The only people I have unfriended have been

someone I dated and then stopped seeing. I no longer wanted him to know what I and my family were doing.

someone who posted a 'prayer' wishing for the death of Obama and wanted their friends to 'like' Instead they got the immediate unfriend button.

FB was considerate and deleted perhaps a full third of my friends a few weeks ago. I wasn't aware until one came around with a pouty message asking what she had done wrong? It takes some doing to figure who is NOT on a list sometimes, but I did note a number of missing nieces and nephews who I won't add back. Again with the 74 YouTube links in a row, I won't miss them. And to be honest, having been elsewhere all of my adult life, they don't know me nor I them.

But to the subject, I have only disconnected one on purpose. Her views were just far too different from what I can accept on people matters. Outright offensive.

Oh, I've hot lots of flaws Mu

I've got friends on facebook that I've met on the interwebs, mostly through here, and would rather keep them than most of my family.
And yes, I think my brother is an irritating internet lout now that here's found out what this whole internet thing is. Last year.

I'm a bit confused about people who say "so and so added me"
-if they send you a friend request, you can ignore or reject it if you don't want to be fb friends with them
-if they add you to a group that you don't want to be in, you can leave the group (and ask them not to re-add you)

I finally (yaay) found out how to categorise my fb friends according to where I know them from, which I find useful because some are work related, some are related to h2g2, some family, etc.

But if I don't want to see their feeds, (some people really have nothing better to do all day than post YouTube links which I can't see in my country) I just either ignore them (as in, I just ignore them) or I block them so I don't see them in my news feed.

Periodically I go and look at people that I haven't seen in my newsfeed for a while, because fb (rather annoyingly) only show you those you've interacted with recently

If you click 'most recent' it should show you everybody's updates... at least that's how it works with me.

I've also got my friends sorted by lists: family, h2g2 and a list of people who play the same games as me Some people are on all three lists.

I hide the posts from a couple of people, but not many, just the irritating ones ( eg someone who started a small business and used FB to spam all day long about it)

. . . I forgot to say that the most interesting posts are from a couple of people who are on no list whatsoever, they are totally uncategorisable. Oh but I do love their status updates somedays.

When I say they added me, I mean they invited me and I accepted. It's shorter to say added! I don't see FB as a place just for people I already know, but a place to meet new friends as well. So I accept invites if I have seen people about. I just then remove them if they never speak to me because then it's clear they are just looking for big numbers of friends, rather than being interested in me.

You can see all of your friends, you have to change the setting. Go to newsfeed and scroll down, you might have to scroll a couple of times if the thing refreshes. Click Edit Options and change the menu thing at the top.

I haven't unfriended anyone on FB.

Blocking the applications and games from posting to my newsfeed helps a lot. I have blocked some people.

Been careful about accepting invites. There are people who were apparently trying to collect the whole set of a. Our high school graduating class from ages ago b. Everyone who went to our high school, ever! c. Everyone who ever worked where I work, now.

thanks, Mina and Lanzababy
I didn't know I could put people on more than one list and to see all the updates

Its been said before...but Ill say it again: Facebook is not the most user-friendly site going. I just cant get by head around lists, privacy and the like and its help is no use whatsoever.

The irony being you set up a very well-functioning, very private group without even meaning to.

Yes - but a couple of times Ive ended up posting things to it that arent relevant to some of its members.

I'm in the camp of people who only take FB friends if they already know them. As a result, I don't 'unfriend' someone based on just one post, because I know they're alright really.
An ongoing pattern of posts might make me re-consider, but only to the extent that it makes me re-assess them as a person. I have one friend who has been 'unfriended' by several people who know him better than me, because his opinions change to whatever other people will disagree with, just so he can argue with them. He's only on FB intermittently though so, these days, I just ignore (as in 'pay no attention to') his posts, especially those along the lines of "Yeah, I hate the Wayans Brothers. Their films are almost as rubbish as the Coen Brothers."
On the other hand, I will occasionally go through my Friends list and unfriend people I've lost touch with and haven't spoken with on FB in months/years.

<< I have only disconnected one on purpose.>>

don't forget you did me as well!!!