yay, tacos!

Names have been obscured to protect the guilty. You know who you are.

If you’re like me, you use Facebook. A lot. I work from home, so there are some days that it’s the closest thing to real socialization I get to do. Even still, there are things about Facebook which drive me nuts. The newest of these annoyances is the new polls or “Ask Friends” posts that keep showing up in my news feed. “Do you like Coke or Pepsi?” “PC or Mac?” “Should I dye my hair?” “Kelly Kapowski, Jessie Spano or Lisa Turtle?”. If any one of your friends votes in these polls, it gets reposted to their walls, and in turn, your feed. I really just don’t care.

And for the record, there is no question about Coke or Pepsi. Pepsi is nasty. Coke is sweet nectar of the gods.

With many posts, you click on the little X in the top right of the post and it brings up a little menu to hide the single post, hide all posts by that person, or if it’s a post from an application, an option to hide all posts from that application. These new poll posts are labeled at the bottom as being from “Ask Friends”, but the flyout menu does not give you an option to hide all posts from “Ask Friends”. What now?

Salvation comes from a combination of two sources – or more specifically, Firefox plugins. Yup, this means that this particular fix is meant for Firefox users. I believe Chrome has similar abilities as well, but I don’t use it enough to know off hand. Feel free to chime in if you do.

*UPDATED* – now with super short, cut to the chase version instructions. Click here to skip to them, or read on to understand what you’re doing.

The first one is Greasemonkey. This plugin allows you to install and run custom JavaScript files which can do lots of great and magical things to enhance your web experience. You can find lots of great scripts at Userscripts.org.  You can get simple things like scripts to always force YouTube to play the HD versions of videos when you’re viewing them on the YouTube website or to unshrink shortened URLs in webpages. Then there are crazier scripts like ones that automate playing Facebook games for you. The script we want is called FFixer.

FFixer is amazing by itself. Many of the built in functions are small and barely noticeable. Stuff like removing “Facebook” from the title of every page. Others are much more useful, like an option to hide all stories of a single type. Tired of reading about every time your friends change their profile photo or maybe you don’t care about links they share, or you’re just sick of every application, not just Farmville. FFixer has you covered, well, mostly. Check the appropriate boxes and you’re almost there.

Once installd, you'll want to configure FFixer

You can turn it all off, but then, why are you on Facebook to begin with?

Unfortunately, turning off all the applications still doesn’t work to get rid of those pesky Ask Friends polls. Apparently, since it’s a first-party application, it doesn’t count. But all is not lost. We can still get rid of them. It just takes a little bit more work.

At this point, if you want to take the short way, you can click here to skip this next section on Firebug and just go to the part where we come back to FFixer. Using Firebug, however, enables us to find the values we need later in this tutorial and possibly at later dates should there be more we want to hide or block from our Facebook feeds.

We need another Firefox plugin: Firebug. If you’re involved in any sort of web development, you’re probably already familiar with Firebug and already have it installed. If you’re not involved with web development, there are still some really useful features like being able to disable javascript or cookies on the fly. Today, we need to use its ability to Inspect elements.

Once you’ve got it installed, you’ll bring up Firebug by clicking the little bug icon in the bottom right of your browser. Once it opens, you’ll want to click the Inspect tool which looks like an arrow hovering over a box. It’s located in the top left of the Firebug window. With the Inspect tool activated, you can hover your mouse over items on the page. Watch the Firebug window as you do. It displays the HTML that generates whatever it is you’re inspecting. Click on an item on the page and it will lock that item to be inspected.

Click the highlighted icons to open and inspect with Firebug

Scroll through your Facebook news feed and find one of those Ask Friends polls. It’s a little tricky, but you want to inspect the whole story and not just the poll itself. Keep an eye on the Firebug window to help guide you. The  whole item is an “li” element that should start with <li  id=”streamstory… Once you’ve highlighted the whole story, click it and lock in the inspector. In the highlighted code in Firebug, you should find  a block that looks like {“src”:xxx, “sty”:yyy,… where xxx and yyy are number values. We need the yyy value. Write it down.

Use Firebug's Inspect tool to grab the story value for an Ask Friends update. (Hint: it's 338)

You can repeat this process with any other annoying application stories that FFixer can’t seem to get rid of – like Places. Do you really need to know that your friend is at the bar again? Scroll through your feed and find a Places check-in story. Inspect it with firebug and get that STY value again.

Use Firebug's Inspect tool to grab the story value for a Places update. (Hint: it's 285)

OK, all done with Firebug.

Bring up the FFixer configuration menu and head into the Advanced tab. Here, you’ll find a section called “Custom Feed Modification”.  We want to blacklist these applications, so we use a -STY value. The values we found were 338 and 285, so on separate lines, enter -338 and -285. Click the button to “Save Custom Feed Modification” and close the FFixer configuration. Refresh your page and the Places and Ask Friends polls should all be gone. Notice that I say that they should. It turns out that Ask Friends has at least two possible STY values: 285 and 280. Places also has a second value of 278. Go ahead and add -280and -278 to the configuration as well. There may be other values as well, but those two values have done me well so far. In the event I find Ask Friends polls are still sneaking through, I can just use Firebug to find those STY values I need to block.

Now add the negative values to the Custom Feed Modifications of the Advanced Panel in FFixer

So there you have it. It’s not an easy, pretty solution like just clicking those fly out menus in Facebook, but it works. Enjoy your Ask Friends and Places free Facebook experience!

The super short version of the instructions

1. Install Greasemonkey.
2. Install FFixer
3. Under FFixer’s settings, go to Advanced and then add the following values to “Custom Feed Modification”: -338, -278, -285, -280. The first two get rid of Facebook Places. The second two get rid of Ask Friends.

You can optionally install Firebug to dig up any other values you may need to blacklist in FFixer.

*UPDATE*
As of 7/9/2011, this is my blacklisted ID list. I do not have any Ask Friends or Places posts showing up in my feed.

-278
-280
-281
-285
-286
-338