How to permanently block Coasterville on Facebook?
By Dave Taylor
The Question:My brother is really into Facebook games and the latest that he seems obsessed with is called CoasterVille. I think it’s all about building a theme park with lots of rollercoasters, but I don’t really care because I am completely uninterested in the game. Except I can’t seem to get rid of all the invitations and status updates from him on my newsfeed. Short of unfriending my own brother, what’s my choice?
Dave’s Answer:
I know exactly what you’re talking about because my nephew has been sucked into the same darn game, and his updates are also taking over my newsfeed when he plays. The problem isn’t with Coasterville, however, but with the fact that it doesn’t categorize itself as a game, so that the updates aren’t filtered out if, like me, you block all game updates. There is another solution, fortunately, but it’s a bit tricky.
As there are more and more different apps and games on Facebook, I think this bad categorization is actually a really big problem. In fact, given that Facebook just announced a redesign of the newsfeed, it might be that I’m not the only person who finds this annoying and frustrating.
To show you how to fix this problem, let’s jump into my own Facebook newsfeed, the “Family” section. As you can see in this first pic, Corey is not only really into CoasterVille, but, well, it kind of takes over my feed too:
Normally, you can move the cursor to the top right and hide the app from directly on the menu, but with this particular app, you can see that’s not an option:
It’s at this point you realize that Coasterville isn’t categorized as a game, by clicking on “Hide…” then trying to “change what updates you get”:
This post is excerpted with permission from Dave Taylor.
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