IT tip of the week... 3 July

How to Appear Offline to Specific People on Facebook Chat

 

One of the reasons Facebook is very popular is because of it’s chat feature. You can chat with your friends on the website. But there it’s quite touch to ignore people on Facebook chat as there is no option to put a busy or not available status, there is not even a invisible option like in other messengers.
But you can do one thing to solve that problem. You can be offline for a specific group of people.

Create Friends Lists

Before you can appear offline to specific people, you need put your friends into lists so that you can tell Facebook which friends you want to be hidden from. If you haven’t already grouped your friends into lists, then you can do so now following these steps.
From the Account menu in the top right of Facebook select “Edit Friends.” You’ll now be at the friends page where you can delete and search through your friends. Click on “Create a List” at the top of the page.

From the “Create a New List” window enter a name for your list and then select all the friends that you’d like to add to that list.
Side note: The next time you add a new friend or accept a friend request, you’ll be able to add them to one of your lists right away.

Once you finish creating your lists, the next thing to do is open Facebook Chat and move on to the next step.

Go Offline to Specific Friend Lists

Now when you open Facebook Chat, you should be able to see all of your Friend Lists that you just created. Each group will have a slider to the far right of the name; the slider will show green by default (meaning you’re showing online to that group).

In order go offline to that specific group of friends, you’ll need to click on the slider so that it turns gray. This will make you show offline those friends only. That’s it!

Hide Friend Lists in Chat

Finally, if you plan to always stay offline to a specific group, then you might as well totally hide that list from displaying in your chat window. You know the saying, “out of sight, out of mind.”
This step is pretty easy.

Just click on “Friend Lists” from the Facebook Chat window and then click on the list that you want to hide. The lists without a check mark next to them are the ones that are hidden.
That’s it, it will no longer display in your chat window until you choose to display it again.
Side note: You can even hide groups that you do show online to.