How to stop annoying your friends with game posts

Is your Facebook Wall inundated daily by game-related statuses?  Have all your non-game statuses been buried by a sea of game posts?  There are two sources of game posts to consider: those generated by you and those generated by your friends.  Let’s just consider the game posts that you generate.  There are several solutions to this dilemma.

The most extreme yet effective solution is to admit that you have a gaming addiction, quit cold-turkey, and block the game app.  Not many of you die-hard gamers will go this route.  In that case, consider the following, less drastic alternative.

The first step is to set up a new Facebook list.  Click on the “facebook” logo on the upper left corner of any Facebook webpage.  On the left-side bar, you should see a “LISTS” header.   If not, click on “MORE” and it should appear.   Move your mouse slightly to the right of “LISTS” and you’ll see “MORE” pop up; click on it to open up a list of all your lists.  Now click on the “Create List” button. 

Let’s say you play a game called Empires & Allies and you want to make game posts visible to only friends that also play the game.  Create a new list called, say, “EMPIRE.”  Now add all your existing fellow gamers on this list.  In the future, if you add any new gaming friends, be sure to add them to this list.

The second step is to tell the game app to utilize this list.  Go to “Account Settings.”  Click on “Apps” on the left-side bar.  (Alternatively, you can go to “Privacy Settings” and then “Edit Settings” for “Apps and Websites.”)  Click on your game.  Look for “App activity privacy: Who can see posts and activity from this app on Facebook?”  Change the setting to the list “EMPIRE” that you created in step one.

Now whenever you play the game and the game posts something on your Wall, the default privacy setting will be the list you selected.  Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each game that you play.  It’s up to you whether to create a single master game list or to create a separate list for each game you play.

All your game posts will now be visible only to your fellow gaming friends.  Your non-gaming friends won’t see your game posts at all.  Keep in mind, however, that you will still see everything.  So if you like having a clean Wall, you still have the job of periodically cleaning it up. 

This solution doesn’t stop your friends from making game posts on your Wall.  You can change a setting so that only you and not your friends can post on your Wall, but you probably don’t want to do this.  You can block the game from posting on your Wall at all, but that’s probably too drastic.  Unfortunately, at this time, Facebook doesn’t seem to have a finer system for setting who can post on your Wall. The best you can do for now is to tell your gaming friends to be selective in what they post to your Wall.  If they don’t know, educate them on hitting the cancel (“X”) button rather than the “Share” button by default.

How to delete many consecutive Wall posts on Facebook quickly

Do you play games on Facebook that practically demand you post continually on your Wall?  Do you annoy the heck out of your Facebook friends?  Maybe you’ve found countermeasures to mitigate the spam to your friends, but you still face an ugly spamfest when viewing your own Wall.  Assuming you wish to continually post to your Wall from games and periodically delete them, here is an efficient method to delete them.

Deleting is easier if the posts you want to delete are all consecutive (right next to each other); if they aren’t, be careful! 

Go to your Facebook Wall.  Keep scrolling down and clicking on “Older Posts” to load older posts.  Review the posts to make sure you know what you want to delete.  It's better to delete from top to bottom. 

Scroll back up to the first post you want to delete.  Position your mouse over the button on the upper right corner of the first post you want to delete.  Click the left mouse button to open the menu for the post.  Hit "d" on your keyboard.  Press enter twice.  If you delete from top to bottom, you don't have to worry about repositioning the mouse due to differences in post lengths.

Repeat as desired.  You'll need to get used to the timing and sequence of button pushing, as well as other idiosyncrasies you may encounter.  Repeat the procedure for each block of consecutive posts you wish to delete.

MouseKey

Probably the slowest and most annoying part of this process is switching between the mouse and the keyboard.  To bypass using the mouse, you can use a Windows app called Mouse Key.  This app lets you control the mouse pointer and buttons using keyboard keys. 

To enable the app, hold down the left Shift and Alt keys at the same time and then press NumLock.  Windows will display a dialog box; press OK to accept.  Set this up one time before you start deleting posts.  You may want to unplug your mouse temporarily to avoid accidentally moving it.

Use "5" on the numeric keypad to emulate the left mouse button press mentioned above.  If this doesn't work, press "/" to change the setting so that "5" does this.  (There are other controls that you can look up.)  After the mouse is positioned, carefully press in sequence “5”, “d”, Enter, Enter.  Repeat as desired.

Using Mouse Key and two hands on the keyboard, I can delete about 1 post per second.

UPDATE, Feb. 23, 2012:

I got tired of deleting posts manually, so I wrote an AutoIt script to simulate the keystrokes.  The script simulates an actual mouse left-click instead of relying on MouseKey.  To be safe, I have the script delete only 4 posts at a time (that's how many show up on my screen at once for me to check before deleting).  The posts should still be preloaded.  I used conservative times for the pauses between key strokes; you may have to increase it even more if you have a slow Internet connection.

Ideally, Facebook should have a better system for controlling Wall posts.

AutoIt script

;
; AutoIt Version: 3.0
; Platform:       Win9x/NT
; Author:         empiresandalliesgame.blogspot.com
;
; Script Function:
;   Deletes 4 consecutive facebook posts
; Posts should be preloaded!
; Hover mouse over post control button
; Press Alt-d to start deletion
; Press ESCAPE to end script

AutoItSetOption("SendKeyDelay", 200)
HotKeySet("!d", "DeletePost")
HotKeySet("{ESC}", "Terminate")

While 1
   Sleep(100)
Wend

Func DeletePost()
   for $count = 1 to 4
   MouseClick("left")
   Sleep(300)
   Send("d{ENTER}")
   Sleep(500)
   Send("{ENTER}")
   Sleep(800)
   next
EndFunc

Func Terminate()
   MsgBox(0, "delete fb post", "Terminated!")
   exit 0
EndFunc