You Can’t Turn Off The Clutter Of Facebook Questions From News Feed

There are already hundreds of thousands of Applications, Games, events and other non human stuff already present on Facebook and responsible for cluttering up your news feed. They have a new companion from today onwards – Facebook Questions.

Facebook quietly launched it’s Questions feature earlier today which allows users to ask questions, participate in a question or follow a question. ny Facebook user can ask a question and get feedback from friends and other unknown people on Facebook (if they want to).

Block Facebook questions

The Problem With Facebook Questions

However, there is a slight problem with Facebook questions.

Whenever any of your friend answers a Facebook question, it’s shared on your news feed. And there is no way to turn off Facebook questions from news feed.

Which means, you can’t hide Facebook questions or remove Facebook questions from news feed in any way. Whenever any of your friends ask or answer a Facebook question, it’s going to appear in the news feed, forcefully.

This is not the case with Facebook applications, games and other stuff because users can selectively block Facebook applications in which they have no interest. The same is also true for Facebook application invites, Game invites and rest of the useless clutter.

While users can surely unfollow Facebook questions in which they have no interest but this is not going to stop the immense amount of clutter already present in their Facebook news feed. If you have a large number of friends on Facebook, you would see the effect of Facebook questions soon because most of the users will either ask a question, create a poll or answer a question and the updates will be thrown to your News feed.

As of now, there is no way to clock Facebook questions from news feed but we hope that someone develops a browser plugin or something which will hide Facebook questions with a CSS trick or something similar.

Facebook says the following:

As with other Facebook applications like Photos and Events, there is no way to turn off Questions.

Block Facebook Questions: Chrome Extensions And Firefox Add-on

If you really hate Facebook questions and want to get rid of it, here are two browser extensions that will help.

If you are using Firefox, install the FB Purity Firefox extension. This extension completely removes all instances of Facebook questions, Groups, notifications and other cluttered items from your news feed. Additionally, the extension will help you to revert back to older Facebook comment system and delete recent activity messages from your profile. The extension is also available for Google Chrome, Opera and Safari browser so it is a complete full featured browser plugin that gets the job done.

Another way to disable Facebook questions in Google Chrome is to use this extension. The extension does what it says, simply install it and all Facebook questions will be removed from your news feed and profile timeline. There is nothing to install and it just works out of the box.

Remove Facebook questions in Google Chrome

Do you know any way to permanently get rid off Facebook questions? Share your ideas in the comments section.

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Written by on Friday, March 25th, 2011

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  • Margo

    You can always choose to only view status updates. That’s all I really care about anyway.

  • Manny

    Fluff Busting Purity will do this!

  • Grant

    I have no doubt that FB Purity will issue an update at some point that enables these to be blocked.

  • steve m

    They’ve just added their own spam to the service. yuk. I just keep on hitting spam on every quiz that shows up in my feed. They should eventually get the message. :)

  • steve m

    Go here: http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=18087

    And then tell them..

    “No”, it wasn’t helpful
    Then choose “I don’t like the answer”.

  • Jud

    Mark as Spam will at least hide that specific poll from your news feed.

    Besides cluttering the news feed, the worst part about this feature is it’s not social. Sure a person can comment, but how many people “like” something without commenting? Bring back the human interaction.

  • Stephanie

    Chrome has an extension to block them with CSS

    https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/fnfccinnkelhmobaenahkeidjiocmnld

  • cswiii

    Not the cleanest way to do it, but these adblock elements get rid of a lot of the cruft. At very least, they should keep you from accidentally clicking through a poll option and thus getting involved in the melee.

    ###pagelet_adbox
    ##.adsCell
    facebook.com##.fbQuestionsPollClickTarget
    facebook.com##.pas.fbQuestionsPollResultsBar
    facebook.com##.pollResultsBar
    facebook.com##.fbQuestionsBlingBox
    facebook.com##.pollOptions
    facebook.com##.fbEigenpollRow
    facebook.com##A[title=\"Ask specific people to answer\"]
    facebook.com##[href*=\"/home.php?sk=question\"]
    facebook.com##.fbEigenpollPager
    facebook.com##.fbQuestionFollowLink

  • http://stevegilbertson.com/blog/19 Steve

    Here is a simple Google Chrome extension that removes all evidence of the feature:
    https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/fnfccinnkelhmobaenahkeidjiocmnld
    Enjoy :-)

    Also, someone adapted my code as a UserScript, which can be used with other browsers (via Greasemonkey): http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/100042

    • http://www.ampercent.com Amit Banerjee

      Thanks steve, we will blog about your extension to block facebook questions.thanks for letting us know

  • Sam

    If you have FB purity, just type the word “answered” into the box that blocks out specific words, and poof :)

  • Jud

    Thanks Steve!

  • astor menehem

    As mentioned previously, FB Purity lets you hide Facebook Questions easily. It also gives you lots of options for hiding most other annoying Facebook Interface elements from your page. To hide Questions using FB Purity, just add “ask friends” (without the quotes) to FB Purity’s Custom Text Filter.

    you can get the add-on here: http://www.fbpurity.com

  • Waffles

    Thank you for your extension, Steve. That was truly a Godsend. I’m glad I found your comment after sending Facebook an angry note about the lack of control over Questions (including no privacy whatsoever). I’m surprised they rolled it out in the state that they did. Wait, it’s Facebook, no I’m not…

  • bethred

    So, Steve M., I did what you suggested (Go to http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=18087), and FB totally would not let me choose that I didn’t like their answer! I clicked it several times and nothing happened. So I clicked “Other” and told FB that these damn questions are annoying and I want them gone. Hopefully if enough of us respond, they’ll fix it!

  • YourQuestionIsSpam

    I have just started marking all Questions as Spam.

  • Raevyn

    It doesn’t give an option to mark it as spam….that’s the problem.

  • Raevyn

    Thanks Astor…I just installed Fluff Buster and I really like it. I like that it’s customizable and I can still check things that it’s hidden if I choose.

  • http://knghosting.com Keith

    You can join the group on FB called
    “Add the ability to remove FB Questions from our feed”

  • Dimiona

    If you use Stylish:
    #home_stream li[class~=\'aid_10150110253435258\']{display:none !important;}

  • amina

    thank you soooo much steve..it worked, i got rid of all the cr**p stuff called FB questions, I hate it..:)

  • amina

    wohooo such a life saver steve..i can’t believe it..it was a real nightmare..so happy..:)

  • http://www.facebook.com/ irfan

    my friend request is blocked, please solve this issue as soon as possille. i am not able to send any request to any friend. please send me solution as soon as possible.

  • John

    Much appreciated…I’m sure that many of us would also like to know how to avoid seeing those pesky share widgets that pop up every time you perform an action in an application…as if we’d want to share every time we buy someone…any suggestions for this type of thing yet? I just don’t know if it’s going to require the user to physically go through and block each and every script one at a time to find the effect…

  • Rachel

    i accidentally press block element under column “arts and entertainment” when i try to delete one.. how to disable it?. all profile pics cant be seen even friends’ profile pics.. appreciate your help.

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