While you have friends that you don’t mind chatting with, sometimes there are people who constantly flood you with chat messages about absolutely nothing interesting. There’s no need to turn off your chat entirely! Instead, you can take advantage of your friend lists and turn off access to chat from people who you aren’t interested in speaking with. In essence this is will help you become “invisible” to as many of your Facebook contacts as you’d like and get on with your life!
Step 1: Create A Friend List
If you haven’t already created a friend list, I suggest checking out our guide about how to use Facebook friend lists before proceeding with this article. Once you’ve gone through the process of setting up a friend list, you’ll now be able to filter out which friends are visible. For the sake of this guide, I’ll show you the sample process of creating a friend list.
Create The List
Visit the Facebook friends page (found here) and click on the “Create New List” button in the top left.
Next up you’ll need to enter the name of a new list. Honestly, I suggest using your pre-existing friend lists, but for the purpose of this guide, we’ll create a sample friend list called “Invisible Chat”. Once you enter the name of the list, you can begin selecting the friends who you want to become invisible from as illustrated in the image below.
Step 2: Block The Friends In Chat
The last step to blocking your friends is to essentially “become invisible”. This is accomplished by clicking on the chat icon in the lower right hand side of your screen. Once you do this, you’ll see a window like the one pictured to the right show up. Since we’ve created a list of people that we want to hide from on Facebook chat, we’ll need to appear offline to those individuals. All you need to do is scroll down to the list that we just created and click on the switch which enables you to “Go Offline”. Once you’ve flipped the switch and it becomes grey, you will no longer be displayed to those individuals.
Now that you’ve gone through these steps you’re done! You have effectively blocked all of your annoying friends on Facebook Chat. Keep in mind that all of your other friends will still see you as online. This is a pretty useful technique as we all have one of those friends who won’t stop IMing us! Stop them now! Hopefully this guide will help you regain a little more silence in your life and increase your productivity!
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I have way too many friends on FB. It would be more efficient to be able to create a list of only a handful of friends with whom I'd like to appear as visible. What a pain to have to go through my 500 friends and click all the ones I want to block!
Comment by Aida Prazak — August 26, 2010 @ 11:13 am
But Nick, how do you delete Friends from your mail spame?
Comment by walter thomas — August 26, 2010 @ 11:37 am
Easy. Follow the directions above and choose the few friends you want to keep visible. Then use your original Friends list and make that the offline group.
Comment by Dionne — August 26, 2010 @ 11:42 am
OVERSIGHT as in foresight or hindsight
…ultimately rest upon short-sightedness and
… long-sighted ONES.
Comment by Ray Loke — August 26, 2010 @ 2:11 pm
What if your friend is in two different lists? If one list is visible and the other invisible, will one cancel the other out? Which one wins?
Comment by Glenn Berkshier — August 26, 2010 @ 6:57 pm
This is old news. We've been able to do this for a long time. Please try posting something new…and giving us a summary of major cities isn't what we want. You guys use to be so good. What happened?
Comment by Kevin — August 27, 2010 @ 12:27 pm
If you have to block or go offline to certain friends
why not just delete them if theyre annoying or not friendly?
Comment by Alan Perry Jr — August 27, 2010 @ 12:28 pm
Sorry, but this is pretty bad advice. When it comes to chat, Facebook will handle conflicting visibility settings by defaulting to the "online" setting. In other words, if your friend is on ANY list that is visibly online, it doesn't matter at all if you put them in an "Invisible Chat" group. They will STILL see you online, unless you remove them from every other group that can see your online status.
It's a much better idea to make a new list of people you WANT to talk to – and have that be the ONLY friends list that you're visibly "online" to. That way, you'll be visible only to who you choose to be visible to – and your other friends lists won't have to be altered.
Comment by Shari — August 27, 2010 @ 5:58 pm
What if we have friends in more than 1 list?
Comment by Anon — August 28, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
i ask mod and owner in chat room
Comment by hooshi — September 29, 2010 @ 4:07 pm
I disagree with most of the comments here. This worked great for me – all you need to do is create a list for those people you do NOT want access to chatting with. I have a young friend who loves to chat but I don't have the time to spend time chatting with her all the time and I can now turn her "off" but still keep her as a friend. Thanks!
Comment by trvene — October 17, 2010 @ 12:03 pm
But then you have to redo that every time you add a new friend…
Comment by Alexa — November 11, 2010 @ 11:06 am
This is not entirely correct. If you add a friend in a list and go offline, they will still appear among other friends (ones that aren't created in a list by default). Very annoying.
Comment by Larry — November 12, 2010 @ 11:29 pm
I'm just curious, can people in a list see that they're in the list..?
So for example, would you advise me not to use a name such as 'Annoying idiots'?
Comment by Aimee — December 23, 2010 @ 4:24 am
do any of you people even know how to read. i keep seeing the same questions over and over again, and it seems like everyone has different advice, even some advice to questions not asked, haha.
all you have to do is create even just one extra list the way they described above. make that list your few friends you DON'T want to block. Once you do that, the rest of your contacts that you did NOT put in that new list will be in their own list called Other Friends. At this point there will be a slider next to "Other Friends" Also mentioned in the article above, simply click on the slider and it will say "Go Offline" bam, done. jeesh, learn to read people.
@Aimee, lol that is hilarious. but seriously think about it. do you see yourself on any kind of list??? obviously if it was possible you would know about it, because you would see yourself on your friends lists, besides there is no way to look at yourself on your own chat, only your friends, so how would they see it?
Comment by Dohn Joe — December 28, 2010 @ 10:45 pm
Aren't people notified if you add them to a friends list? How can you prevent friends from being notified?
Comment by NEG — February 8, 2011 @ 10:09 am
this is what i don't understand. when you log into facebook, "create new list" is not an immediate option that pops up like, let's say, wall or info, where do you go to get the the CNL option. thanks—
Comment by jonny — February 11, 2011 @ 4:57 pm
hello……………………………….?
Comment by fareed ahmed — March 2, 2011 @ 4:38 am
hello i am sadia from isbd …………………..?only grils contct me…..03325816001
Comment by sadia mughal — March 2, 2011 @ 4:41 am
no they are not notified. Maybe you are getting confused about adding friends to facebook vs adding them to you facebook friends list (or any list)? Obviously, if someone invites you to be a facebook friend, you say yes or ignore and if it's yes, they are notified. But once you have facebook friends, you can put them into various lists and they will not know. That's just for you to control what info you send to whom, etc. For example, you can have a list of friends to send updates only to that friends list, or just leave it and send updates to everyone, or you can have a list and say send updates to everyone except people on a list you create. And I guess you can make a list for your chat too acc'd the above post. I hope this helps.
Comment by Debbie — July 10, 2011 @ 2:34 am
Ok so am I able to hide from some friends and not from others?? LOL I just had to ask again. Seems like everyone is asking the same question over and over so I thought I would jump on the bandwaggon
Comment by joe schmoe — July 11, 2011 @ 2:16 pm
HATE THE NEW CHAT…I DON'T WANT ANYONE…FRIEND OR NOT 2 KNOW WHEN I'M ON FB…MOST TIME I LEAVE MY PUTER ON FB PAGE & IT WOULD APPEAR I AM ON ALL THA TIME….NOT TRUE…JUST HATE THAT U CAN GO OFF-LINE 2 EVERYONE…PLZZ CHANGE IT BACK…DON'T LIKE…PEOPLE, YES, FRIENDS, R CONSTANTLY WANTING 2 CHAT…NOT INTERESTED…IF I WANTA TALK, I'LL CALL THEM…THANKS!
Comment by S ABSTON — July 16, 2011 @ 1:40 pm
I don't even have the option to view my lists in chat!! Its either all or none… ggRRRrRRR!!
Comment by vicel — August 1, 2011 @ 7:26 pm
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haiiiiiiiiiiiiiii i want this type of setting agian in FaceBook plzzzzzzzzzzz Provide me…
Comment by karthik — September 24, 2011 @ 8:42 am
what i would like to do is take off all the friends who appear on my chat list that i NEVER chat with and see only the ones that I do. I have created a chat list, and set chat to only show me with my chat list but do not see any other options to remove the random people on my chat screen that I never chat list. Also I can't find my ticker… my chat screen takes up the hole right side of my screen (well the ads appear of coarse) and there are no options for minimizing anything…
Comment by Tamela — October 6, 2011 @ 10:16 pm
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