We’ve all been guilty of it.

We use a Facebook application, usually a game we play, and it wants to share news with our friends every time we so much as twitch near the keyboard. This can be useful to the 2% of our friends who actually use the application in question but to the other 98% (or in my case about 900 unfortunate souls), it’s Spam.

Don’t believe me? Check out this 1.5 million 2.03 million (single day increase from draft to post) member strong group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!“

Trust me folks, its spam, and nobody likes a spammer. In fact, if you regularly post game info I’d be willing to bet 20% or more of your friends have blocked you from their news feed. That’s going to suck when you actually have something important to say.

Well, dear reader, I’m here today to teach you how to be a responsible Facebooker. Unfortunately, you are going to need to jump through a few hoops the first time you set this up but when you are done, never again will your mother-in-law get requests to “Torture A ULF Lieutenant” at 2pm on a Tuesday when you are supposed to be at work making the money to pay your rent.

Torture your in-laws with Mafia Wars posts

For starters you will need:

• To know how to create a new friend list
• Knowledge of how to set up security zones with secondary lists
• To know how to open multiple browser windows or tabs
• About 15min for the average moderate-to-heavy use application

I’ll cover all of these bullets in turn except for multiple windows and tabbed browsing. For that I’m going to make you google the answer because it’s ouside the range of what I have patience to screenshot.  Ok I won’t really make you google it, that link should pretty much cover the basics.

So here is the 1000 foot overview of what we are going to do

1. Create friend groups for each of your games/applications. This way when the Mafia wants you to torture that ULF member, you can post it to your wall in such a way that ONLY people from Mafia Wars actually see the request.
2. Create security groups so that friends who you only know from Mafia Wars don’t know your phone number, your weekend plans, and how drunk you got on Saturday night.
3. Finally, we are going to learn how to change the visibility settings in a game when it asks to post something on your wall.

So, let’s get started! Feel free to skip over any parts you already know. This is a Facebook 101 lesson from the ground up.

Step 1: Create a friend list on Facebook

1. Open Facebook, on the top right click on “Account”
2. Select “Edit Friends”

   
   

3. In the center column on the top left, click on “create new list”
4. Add at least one member. See the screenshot below illustrating this process. The people in blue are members of your list, the ones in white are not.
   

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I’d like to add for posterity that getting back to a list for editing follows a slightly different path. You can either edit the lists per-person on the “Edit Friends” page or you can do it from the friends list interface.

Option #2 - From Your Home Page

For the latter option you need to click “friends” on the left column of your home page, this will expand your lists. Clicking a list will show you the news for that grouping. At the top-right of the center column, you will find an “Edit List” button. That will let you add/remove friends from a list. In Step 3 you will see why this is almost always the easier option.

Step 2: Secure your friend lists on Facebook

Ok so let’s face it, not all of you want to expose your phone number, relationship status, and political wall rants to the kids you play Farmville with. That’s totally understandable. I have a list called “limited profile”, which means you can’t see jack crap and another called “somewhat limited” that people like mom & dad go under so when a DJ says “hey did you call me at 5:30 this morning?” my parents don’t wonder how I plan on making it to lunch by 1pm (I’m looking at you Mr. Dresden).

Some of us learn these things in life the hard way. I’m often one of them.

But I digress. Essentially you want to create a series of secondary lists for security purposes that define how much of your profile a person can see. You can then add Castle Age players to both the Castle Age list AND a limited profile list – because Johnny McMasters in Manitoba just doesn’t need to know the same life details as your BFF in Manhattan or your former roommate in Los Angeles.

Once you have created a series of security “zones” (to use the IT vernacular), click on “Account Settings” again (top right) and this time go to “Privacy Settings”. Under both “Profile Information” and “Contact Information” you will want to select “Custom Settings and assure that each of your security zones is blocked from the appropriate areas.

Some of you may be asking “Why not just block every member of Castle Age from seeing my contact information?”

If you figured out the answer, congratulations, you get a cookie.

You may have real life friends who ALSO play Castle Age, Mafia Wars, or have a secret passion for zookeeping. I’m pretty sure you won’t want to block them from seeing critical information on your Facebook. So two groups it is – one for sorting and another for security. Deal with it.

Step 3: Determine who plays the same game

Okay so you can set up lists, you can grant everyone the proper security rights to your personal information – but how do you know who all plays the application? This part is pretty easy. I like to do it as follows:

1. Open the application, whether it’s Poker, Farmville, Mafia Wars, or some yet unknown phenomenon.
2. Scroll to the very bottom of the page.
3. Look for a link to the application name on the bottom left side of the footer. Click it.
   
   
   
4. This will take you to a page with information on the game & developer. Click on the “Info” tab
   

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5. Once again, scroll to the bottom of the page
6. Under “friends using this application” click “see all”. It’s in small blue letters to the right just above a random selection of eight friends who have the app installed.
   

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This is the list you need to create. This is also the tedious part.

1. Open another Facebook page in a separate browser (Ctrl-N) or a separate tab (Ctrl-T)
2. Leave your list open in the first instance and in the second, create your friend list
3. Carry names across. For some god awful reason they are not in the same order.
4. I find it useful to begin typing the name of each person in order, click to select, then double click my typing to “highlight all” and start typing the next person. This is all illustrated in the attached screenshot (below)
5. If you use Windows 7 and are using two separate browser windows, hi-light each one in turn. With your game members list hit “Windows Key + Left Arrow” and on the other hit “Windows Key + Right Arrow”. This will jump one window to each side of the page for easy copying.You can set this up in other operating systems but you don’t get the nifty shortcut keys. You can see why this helps.
   
   

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6. Finally, consider hitting “save list” every 50 entries or so. You don’t want your browser to crash after 300 additions. Also, make a mental note of what person you are on at the start of each. It saves time if/when something goes wrong.

The larger the list, the more you will despise this initial process. Once you have the list created though, it only takes a few seconds a day to maintain. More or less, every time a new game friend is added you should immediately get them categorized. 30 seconds at the time of addition is a lot easier than cross checking the whole damn thing once a month.

Step 4: Posting information to the correct group

At this point, you will want to open your favorite spam producing application and perform an action that will result in a post being made to your wall. When the request pops up, look for the padlock icon. Click it and select “Custom”

You will note that in many browsers, the windows don’t quite fit inside of one another. This is tricky but not an impossible situation.

• If you have blocked a limited profile by default that includes most members of your gaming community, remove that right away.
• Change “Make visible to these People” to “Specific People”
• Type the name of the list(s) you want to publish to
• If your windows don’t fit click on the gray  text that reads “Only the people above can see this”, hold down the left button, and drag down. This will force the window to scroll so you can once again see the “save setting” button. Please note that while this works in Chrome and Internet Explorer, it does not work in some versions of Firefox and I have not tested it in Safari.

  Facebook needs to fix their UI bug. I’m talking to you Zuck.

• Click on Save Setting
• Add any notes you like and press “Publish”
  

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A quick note for Farmville players! The only spam-producing event in your game (that I know of) is a lost animal. You will not be able to complete Step 4 unless you find one!

Congratulations Facebookers! Once your lists are set up it is dead simple to publish game notification to only a select group of gamers and not everybody you know. Now, for the sake of my poor bleeding eyeballs – get back out there and stop making a mess of my news feed.

Just remember: every time you add new friends to a game, add them to the appropriate lists.

Enjoy!

As an aside for developers, I would say there is a pretty strong need for an application that automates this process. This is above and beyond my ability; however, I’ve got a feeling it is well within yours. Someone make it happen, please