Can't win with that crappy new chat sidebar on Facebook.

[kane_magus]

I don't like that thing. It looks ugly and it sucks. I want it to go away forever.

Well, there seems to be a way to have it go away temporarily. However, to do that, you first have to click on the blasted thing in order to select the hide option. Clicking on it apparently immediately makes you "Available to chat" which I most definitely do not want, since I've always kept the chat turned off. If I click to disable the "Available to chat" setting and then hide it, it goes away. The problem is that if I reload the page, the damn thing just fully pops back up again with the whole "A Faster Way to Message Try It Now!" crap, whether I had it hidden or not. Also, if I click somewhere on the page after this, it does seem to hide it again, but it looks like it sets the chat to be in an active state again, rather than "Offline" as I usually keep it, even if I had previously set myself to "unavailable" (again). Bah.

Facebook, seriously, why must you continue to make your site ever crappier? I suppose I could just install another Firefox add-on that claims to get rid of it. In fact, I've already tried that, but BetterFacebook seems to interfere with F.B. Purity, which is another Firefox add-on I already had installed to get rid of crap that had previously been added by FB, in particular those asinine Facebook Questions things. I don't feel like monkeying around to get the two to play nice, or to determine if BetterFacebook is, well, better than F.B. Purity and can just replace that altogether. Maybe later. But then, the fact that I'm having to install Firefox add-ons in an increasingly futile attempt to decrappify Facebook in the first place is a pretty bad sign.

*weary sigh*

Maybe it's just time for me to abandon Facebook altogether. Perhaps I should consider checking out this new Google+ thing as an alternative. I don't expect that will be much better though, at least in the long-run anyway.

Or maybe I should do what I've been increasingly feeling would be a good idea and just abandon this "social networking" junk as a whole. At least the invasive Facebook style crap, anyway. Just kill everything and at most keep only LiveJournal. Maybe Twitter as well, since that's also been pretty inoffensive to me, for the most part.

</Cranky Old Man>

Comments

[korby.livejournal.com]

Little button at the bottom of the sidebar with a gear icon on it. Has a 'Hide Sidebar' option.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

And that is precisely what doesn't work properly, as described in my post above.

[korby.livejournal.com]

They must have fixed it then, because it's still showing me offline since I set it yesterday after I read this and left my comment.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

It's still doing the same thing as above for me. I click it (which sets it to "available to chat"), make it not available again, then click to hide. It hides it, which is great. But next time I load up Facebook or even just refresh the page or whatever, there's the damn side bar again. At this point, if I just click anywhere on the page it does hide it again, but it seems to put it in the active/available state which I don't want, so if I want chat to be turned off, I have to repeat the above process. As of now, I've just decided to leave the sidebar alone while it's up and try to ignore it, since at least then it appears to not be actually active in that state, as it's just showing the "TRY IT NOW" button.

[korby.livejournal.com]

Then you must be blocking cookies or denying Javascript or something preventing it from setting correctly, because it's still in offline mode for me from when I set it to that the other day. Maybe one of those addons you have is screwing with it.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Noscript isn't blocking anything on Facebook, Facebook is one of the very few sites that I allow to set cookies, and I completely uninstalled F.B. Purity just to make sure that wasn't it.

Despite all of that, it's still doing the same thing on mine.

FB Chat Sucks

[thegooch.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

I never use FB for chat either, I have other programs for chatting. What really bothers me is the "try it now" button is the only option. What if you don't want to try it? What if you already tried it on another computer and didn't like it?

How about giving users a choice by adding a "no thanks" button that disables the piece of sh*t!

Re: FB Chat Sucks

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd much prefer to be able to disable it altogether than to merely hide it, even if the hide functionality actually did work the way it should.