Are you tired of the pillow fight application? Tired of seeing blingee book cards posted to your Facebook Profile? I know that I sure as hell am but unfortunately there’s no way to block these applications from posting to your wall. While I’d love to write an article about “How To Block The Pillow Fight Application”, the only thing you can block the application from doing currently is accessing your personal information when your friends use the app.
When Facebook created the new stream API, they failed to include anything for blocking others from posting application stories to your wall. While you can block your friends from posting on your wall via Facebook’s privacy settings, there’s no way to differentiate between the types of wall posts that you’d like to prevent users from posting. The end result is a wall filled with junk.
Applications have been using various methods for posting to users’ walls including forcing users to grant the application extended permissions (which is against the Platform terms of service). After first writing about the Pillow Fight application last month, the volume of notifications has only increased. I would have thought that Facebook would add a link for “block all stories from [Application Name]” to the bottom of all application wall posts.
This method has resulted in a number of applications gaining tons of traction that they probably don’t deserve. Pillow Fights put the platform back almost three years when the classic “Snowball Fights”, “Throw Poop”, and “Water Fight” applications were popular. Those types of applications were part of the reason many viral channels became restricted. Ultimately a small number of developers began abusing the viral channels as is the case now.
Facebook should do something to resolve this as soon as possible because it’s really degrading the overall site experience. Don’t take my word for it though, check out all the status updates below from people when searching for the term “Pillow Fight”.
Agreed.. you can block them from your Notifications, so why not your Wall. I don’t think App developers understand though that Profiles don’t get many page views so it’s not helping them as much as they think. News Feed is king.
Hover over the feed story, click “Hide” and the middle option should be “Hide [application name]“. Et voilà!
Hey, Karl Bunyan, that is not AT ALL what he’s talking about.
@Karl – That’s for the news stream, right? That doesn’t seem to work on the wall.
I haven’t seen any way around this issue other then to defriend the people who are doing it and that isn’t a step I want to take right now. I also don’t want to close my wall – most people post really great stuff. But I’m starting to feel like I need to continuously monitor my wall so I can delete crap like that from being posted.
Why not just block the application?
Click the application name to go to its main page, then Block Application, just underneath the app’s image/logo.
I also agree. I really like FB and want it to succeed!
Having said that, imo, FB needs a blanket filter so we’re not having to manually block every iteration of every “Pillow Fight-ish” app every day.
So, even if apps FORCE (against TOC) a user to post to friends walls, those posts only appear if the recipient allows them.
Why not include such an obvious filter? Whatever the motivations to allow such behavior, imo, in the end, the abusers are rewarded and the quality users are driven away.
I suppose I’m lucky because I’ve never had a post end up on my wall from an application a friend uses.
I hope I just haven’t jixed myself with that comment.
yes you can. if you block the application it will not post on your wall. alternatively, you can add the app and then edit the preferences to not allow publishing. then block notifications.
this doesn’t seem to be a very important problem.
Hello Nick,
I’m not sure if you’ve seen our App’s Info tab recently. We have created a special Opt-Out page for Wall posts:
http://apps.facebook.com/pillowfightme/optout
For people who have opted out, we will not allow their friends to post any pillows on their wall.
Regards,
- Anand
Developer: Pillow Fight
There’s an option to not allow people to post on your wall.
These things have ruined facebook and as a resulf i have gone on to delete nearly 1300 from my friends list.
It is stopping people from putting a bit of thought into saying something to the people in their friend list…Its braindead rubbish
For me the worst wall spam is coming from FRIEND INTERVIEW, damn it’s so irritating!
Ian David Chapman has figured out a way to do this. It’s not easy, but it keeps the most egregiously offensive crapplications from posting garbage on your wall without banning your idiotic friends (who probably deserve it but you’re a nice person) in the process: http://www.iandavidchapman.com/how-to-block-facebook-applications-from-posting-on-your-wall/