How to Hide Facebook Questions from your FB news feed using FB Purity

FB Purity cleans up your Facebook news feeds
FB Purity Tip: You can hide the new Facebook Questions and Answers from your newsfeed, using the FB Purity browser add-on by opening up the FB Purity options screen (via the FB Purity link at the top of your newsfeed) and adding the text “ask friends” (without the quotes) to the Custom Text Filter box. This will filter out all Facebook Questions or Answers posts from your news stream.

Get FB Purity here

FB Purity v4.4.1 fixes Delete Recent Activity + Block Application Functions

I just released v4.4.1 of FB Purity, the Facebook spam cleaner and annoyance fixer. This release fixes the Block Application and Delete Recent Activity functions.

You can get the latest version of F.B. Purity here: http://www.fbpurity.com

FB Purity v4.4.0: Restores Comment Button – Fixes Facebooks silly new commenting system

FB Purity cleans up your Facebook Homepage
Facebook recently changed the way comments work on the site, now instead of having to click the “Comment” button to submit your comment, pressing “Enter” or “Return” submits the comment, whereas before pressing either of those would add a new line to your comment. I dont know the reason why they have done this, but a lot of people are not happy with this, as it breaks the convention of Textareas on the web, which always add a new line if you press Return or Enter.

Anyway I figured out a way to restore the old system, whereby you need to click the “Comment” button in order to submit your comment, and pressing return/enter will just add a new line, like it used to, and like how every other site on the web functions.

FB Purity fixes Facebook's new Commenting system

FB Purity V4.4.0 adds the old commenting functionality back by default. If you prefer the new Facebook commenting system, you can disable the old commenting system in the FB Purity Options screen, by ticking the “Hide” “Comment Button” option.

Get FB Purity v4.4.0 – It Fixes the Screwy Facebook Commenting System

FB Purity v4.3.1 Released : Fixed Delete Recent Activity on HTTPS pages, Fixed missing FBP info bar on profile pages + more

FB Purity - Cleans up Your Facebook Homepage

F.B. Purity is a browser extension for Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, that cleans up Facebook, by filtering out all the application spam and other junk you dont want to see, leaving a much cleaner, and more user friendly site.

Changes in F.B. Purity 4.3.1:

  • Fixed the “Delete Recent Activity” button on the profile page to work with Facebook’s new HTTPS settting
  • Fixed the missing FBP information bar on profile pages
  • Show/Hide filters now save youtube video’s current position, so when you resume playing after showing or hiding extras/apps it should restart just where you left it
  • Hide sponsored box option now hide ads on the new photo lightbox popups
  • Application filter now catches more app messages, i noticed certain applications were getting past the application filter, so i tightened up the code to trap more of the evil beasties
  • Fixed anomalous delete button on privacy page. There was a floating delete button showing up on the Privacy page, ive fixed it.
  • Added kodak easyshare,Snaptu for Facebook and Instagram to default application whitelist.

I also noticed that FBP now works on the new style Facebook Fan Pages, which saves me having to recode it for that.

If you are a fan of FBP and appreciate all the work that goes into this, please donate, to keep the F.B. Purity project alive.

Get FB Purity v4.3.1 here

F.B. Purity v4.3.0 – Adds Delete Recent Activity Button, App + Extra Filters now work on Profile pages

FB Purity - The Facebook Cleaning Browser Extension3dcda62d9f724a219898c72026c29bee

Ive just released and update to FB Purity (V4.3.0)

New in version 4.3.0 of FB Purity:

  • Adds “delete recent activity” button to your profile page
  • “App + extra” filtering (and Whitelisting and Blocking) now works on profile pages
  • Added delete friend request button.
  • Enables full screen button for youtube videos.
  • Moved FBP Information Bar below the compose window.
  • New extra option to filter recent activity on profile pages
  • Improved the “block all apps on the page” functiontionality
  • Added nokia N900,and Ovi by Nokia to default app whitelist.

Delete Recent Activity Button – Regain Your Privacy

The delete recent activity button shows up on your Facebook profile page, like so:

and lets you delete all the recent activity that is currently showing (on screen) on your profile page, if you want it to delete more recent activity, you need to scroll the page down, and click “Older Posts” a few times, the more times you click the older posts link the more recent activity stories the function will be able to delete. Next click the “Delete Recent Activity” button, which is displayed next to your “Edit Profile” page. A summary of all the Recent Activity messages that are currently on the page, will be displayed, like so:

and you will be asked whether you want to proceed with deleting them, if you click “OK” FBP proceeds to delete them one by one, it updates the button with the count of how many its deleted, and when its complete it will pop up an alert box telling you its finished, like so:

Application and “Extra” Filtering Now Works on Profile Pages

You can now filter out the application messages from other peoples profiles, and also certain “extra” messages can also be filtered, and the Custom Text Filter also works on profile pages now too. Not all the “extras story options” work on profile pages, as they have different ID codes to the ones on the homepage, im still investigating how best to deal with the different codes. Theres also a new Extra option called “Hide Recent Activity (Profile Pages), as its title suggests, it lets you hide the Recent Activity blocks on peoples profile pages, if you do choose to hide them, as always you can show them again by clicking the “Show Extras” link in the FBP information bar.

Added delete friend request button.

Facebook recently decided to remove the Delete friend request button, instead replacing it with a “Not Now” button, FBP now adds the Delete button back, so you can instantly decide whether or not you want to delete a friend request. The extra button looks like this:

Enables full screen button for youtube videos.

Facebook also recently decided to remove the “Full Screen” button displayed in Youtube videos, which let you watch Youtube videos full screen in your facebook newsfeed, i guess its because they want people to use their own Facebook Video product. Anyway, FBP now re-enables the Full Screen video for Youtube videos.

Get the latest version of F.B. Purity ( v4.3.0 )

If you like FB Purity, and would like to return the favour, please donate to show your appreciation and gratitude, Cheers! :) — Steve

FB Purity v4.1.0 now available – BA button upgraded – App Filtering can now be turned off

I just released a new version of F.B. Purity, v4.1.0.

In this version: “BA” (block application) button is now dual use, if there are multiple application messages on the screen and you click the BA button, it asks if you want to block all the applications at once. If you click ok, it blocks them all, if you click cancel, it asks if you just want to block the single application you clicked. With this feature, blocking facebook applications just got a whole lot easier! :)

Ive added an option to let you switch off the application filtering, if you would prefer to see all the application messages in your stream without having to click the “show app msgs” link, just untick the box on the FBP options screen labelled “Application Msgs” “Hide”.

Ive also updated the “hide sponsored box” option to hide more ads, and ive added a couple more applications to the default app whitelist: “Facebook mobile by Opentech ENG” and “flipboard”.

Get FB Purity v4.1.0 now and Clean up Your Facebook Homepage

If you are updating from WordPress 2.9 to v3.0.4 due to the latest security advisory – you should update your Math Comment Spam Protection plugin too

I recently updated my wordpress blog to v3.0.4, due to the recent Security Advisory Notice released by WordPress.org, just before Xmas, and it all seemed to be go quite smoothly, it was just a case of overwriting all the old files.

But just now i checked my wordpress admin page, and realised that tons of spam comments had been added over the period since i had made the upgrade. Well, as i cant run the built in akismet spam filtering plugin on this server, due to certain restrictions, i instead use the excellent Math Comment Spam Protection wordpress plugin, which seems to block about 99% of the spam, but unfortunately i realised that the version i was using was incompatible with the latest 3.0 branch of the WordPress publishing platform, and was now letting through all the spam, so i went to the Math Protection plugins homepage, grabbed the latest version and updated it.

The update process was really simple, simply unzip the file, and copy the new files over the old ones, “jobs a good’un”, as they used to say. Dont forget to make a donation if you are a fan of the plugin! it certainly saves me and other wordpress admins a lot of time and effort!

FB Purity v4.0.0 Released – Fixed the bug with app/s extra/s filtering

Ive released FB Purity v4.0.0, the new version fixes the bug with the hide/show apps/extras filters. Also a few other tweaks, full release notes at the FB Purity News page

Xmas Web Puzzle – Can you figure out how it was done? – Difficulty Level – Medium/Easy

Heres a quick christmas web puzzle for you:

The following web page features a snowman, the snowman is a single unicode character, try and view the source code of the page though, and figure out how the snowman is being displayed.

snowman xmas web puzzle

(please note this might not display anything in the current windows version of chrome, if it doesnt, try it in firefox or opera)

F.B. Purity v3.9.6 – New – Customise Facebook CSS

I released a new version of FB Purity (v3.9.6) – the browser add-on / extension for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera that cleans up and de-clutters your facebook homepage news feeds.

This version fixes a couple of small bugs (the hide suggestion box option, and also a bug with blocking applications from the “started using app” messages). New in this version is a new Custom CSS feature. The Custom CSS box on the FBP options screen, lets you enter your own CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) rules, which allows you to alter the way Facebook is displayed. So if you know some CSS you can alter the display properties of various features of the site. Click here for some facebook CSS code examples

And heres a demo of a simple black and white style sheet. Click the thumbnail for the full size image.

Get the latest version of F.B. Purity v3.9.6 (now with Customisable CSS)