The nefarious FB strikes again!

My friend at work said she had 22 friend suggestions this morning, and three more when she got back to her desk from talking to me. I haven't received any, but I'm notoriously unsociable on social networks.

I have received only one of these phantom friend suggestions. The suggested friend is already on my (very short) friends list, and the ostensible suggester is someone close enough to both of us to have observed that. I figured it was some glitch in the system.

"A glitch," which is to say: business as usual in the FB world. Though many of these problems are small, the cumulative effect is discouraging to say the least. I feel a certain grim satisfaction in the notion that Facebook, which I dislike but use because the herd uses it and to eschew it would mean missing a lot of news and invitations, might be gasping its last sometime this year.

Wow, I am so unpopular that even the glitches don't like me. Not one friend suggestion here.

Can I piggyback on a Facebook question? Does anyone know if it's possible (and if it is possible, then how) to hide the various "So and So likes Such and Such a Group" postings in the news feed? I have childhood friends who seem to do nothing but join annoyingly offensive Facebook groups and I'd just rather not know about it.

occhiblu: I don't believe it is. You can hide the individual entirely from your news feed, but that will also hide status updates as well as group-joinings from that individual (and I've done that for a few "friends").

I have three suggestions today but they're all from my ex-minister and she's always trying to get all of her church members to connect on FB so I doubt that these are bogus.

I got 17 of these yesterday, almost all from someone who had recently been friending people we mutually knew and is the type of person who might use the suggestion feature, so I wasn't surprised. Now that I see it's everywhere I'm not surprised, either, knowing Facebook. The hell?

If it wants to be the social glue of the internet it needs to behave a lot more predictably and controllably.

Facebook is pure evil and things like this are just friendly warnings from the hamsters running the internet that you should jump ship while you still can.

the mister and I both have our privacy settings on lockdown mode, additionally we have no apps enabled, and have ruthlessly deleted any that we used in the past. We've also hidden any and all app spam from our feeds and our friends all know better than to invite us to take quizzes, join games, etc... Neither of us has seen any unusual friend suggestion spam / requests recently.

Facebook is useful enough to us (event planning, family contact, group announcements, etc...) that we aren't likely to nuke our profiles anytime in the near future. We do keep them pretty tightly managed, though.

occhiblu, my solution to your problem was "unfriend them". In my case, these people unilaterally turned out to be the same douchebags I didn't much get along with in high school, so it was no great loss.

FYI, I don't friend colleagues. They get Linkedin, or nothing.

I had this happen yesterday. One friend sent 10 or 12 requests to me and I thought it very odd that he did so. I guess I can quit (mentally) cursing him.

I have my FB privacy locked down pretty tight, too. It's wide open to friends and family and semi-open to gaming friends. People I don't know can see very little and what they can see doesn't matter.