These simple Facebook tips will save you, and therefore me, a lot of time and trouble

Speaking of Facebook and Everyone’s a DJ, I had a conversation on Friday that reminded me about one of Facebook’s newer and more common user issues. You’ve probably run into this issue yourself, and in the interest of being helpful, or at least venting, I thought I’d bring it up.

When I say I had a “conversation,” what I mean was that I got a Facebook message from a stranger on Friday afternoon, and all it said was “Oi stop emailing me!”

Now, I didn’t know who this woman was, and I certainly hadn’t gone out of my way to email her. But I had sent out a couple of messages about the party – one on Thursday, one on Friday – because I had a lot of spots to fill and I was eager to lock down the schedule.

“Are you one of the ‘maybes’ or ‘haven’t replieds,’” I asked, “who got the couple of messages I sent this week about Disgraceland tomorrow night? If so, I’m afraid there’s no way to keep you from getting the alerts I send to everyone unless you remove the event from your listings.”

If you’ve ever managed an event listing on Facebook, you’ll know that you can message all your guests with just a couple of clicks, but there’s no easy way to exclude specific people from that message. If you’re on the receiving end, however, and you don’t want to go to the event in the first place, you can cut off the mail by declining the invitation.

“Give that a try,” I said, “and please accept my apologies for the messages I’ve sent.” And with that, I went back to not getting yelled at. As far as I could tell, I’d offered a quick and simple solution to a non-issue, and I’d done it more politely than warranted.

“Well don’t fricken sent me an invite to begin with!” she soon replied. “I dont even bloody know you.. I’ll keep ignoring them but please withdraw from any future events as I do not wsh to receive them.”

And there’s the problem. One of Facebook’s many, many recent site updates seems to have changed the way event listings are processed. Unless you’re actively checking your invitations, you may not even know that you’ve been invited to an event, until you get a couple of messages from the organizer. Sending out “I just wanted to make sure you know you’re invited to this” messages has unfortunately become a pretty common practice as a result.

Oh, and as long as I’m talking about the way events work, it’s also got to be said that the organizer isn’t the only person who can send you an invitation. For public events, depending on the settings, you can get an invitation from anyone who knows you and thinks you might want to go.

I’m guessing the woman in question didn’t know that, and I can see why she might have thought I’d gone out of my way to target her for some reason. But to paraphrase the guy from House of Pain who wasn’t Everlast, “I know she thought I had, but yo, I’d never heard of her.”

“Someone else, I don’t know who,” I explained politely, because I’m one of those people who thinks that being measured and mature when dealing with a person who’s throwing a tantrum is funny, which I guess speaks to a certain immaturity on my part, “invited about seven hundred people I’ve never met. The only people I invited are the people who chose to join my group, because I don’t like spamming people.

“Sorry you were one of the others, and you got a couple of emails you didn’t want as a result, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. I can’t even prevent it from happening again, short of asking everyone else not to bother you.”

I’m not proud of it, but I did flirt with the idea of asking her if I should call the next event “Everyone’s a DJ Except This One Lady.” That would have been a bit much, right?

“When you get emails like these,” I reiterated, “just decline the invitation.” It wasn’t exactly a “change the channel if you don’t like the show” for the social media generation, but it was the best and only piece of advice I could give her.

I never heard back from her, and that’s fine. She’d already taken the time to send two angry messages, instead of just deleting the two she’d gotten from me, so I wasn’t expecting a third. But I like to think she learned an important lesson, and I hope I’ve been able to pass that lesson on to you.

And if not, at least I got to vent about an angry stranger who completely overreacted to a total non-problem. That’s something, isn’t it?

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