Freaking Facebook fecks about with the Select All Friends function again

Already the buggiest site on the whole internet as far as we’re concerned (it’s the only site that regularly crashes every day without fail on our Chrome/Windows 64 bit system), Facebook’s code has had another re-jig that has made things even more annoying for its users.

Give us Select All!

One of the lingering annoyances with Facebook was the inability to select all your friends with one click when you wanted to invite them to an event.

Instead of Facebook providing a useful and logical ‘Select All’ option, users were expected to waste their precious time individually clicking on every single person in their friends list.

For a while, this fix worked a treat:

The newly redesigned Facebook has led inviting members to an event/group/page to an even more complex process. Why can’t they just make a “select all” button? Initially I got tired of clicking several hundred times on all the pictures to invite people to my event, so I came up with this small piece of Javascript: …

Go to your event/group/page, click invite people and then paste this snippet in the URL field of your browser.
Left-click the mouse in the URL field and hit Enter. Your invitations will not be sent yet, but all your friends will be selected. Click the “Invite” or “Send” button on the Facebook page to finally send the invites.
Code:
javascript:elms=document.getElementById(‘friends’).getElementsByTagName(‘li’)&for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === ‘object’){fs.click(elms[fid])&}}

Hugely popular fix

Such was the need for this functionality, the author of this neat bit of code received over a thousand comments from users thanking him for his work.

The beauty of it was that people could highlight all their friends in one go, and then deselect those who had asked not to be invited (or they know wouldn’t be interested) – a simple process that saved oodles of time.

But now the idiots at Facebook have messed about with the code and prevented that fix from working.

It’s borked

We’ve tried other suggestions,  like adding a bookmarklet and we’ve also tried the fixes suggested at – ironically – a Facebook page set up to try and solve the problem.

At the time of publishing, a rather techie looking piece of code has been contributed that claims to fix the problem, but we suspect that it will be too daunting for most users.

Our friends, our choice

Now, although we can understand that there is the potential for spam, it shouldn’t be up to to Facebook to tell users who they can and can not invite to their events – and if users felt that such invites from their friends were spammy, then they are free to de-friend them.

Now, users have to go trawl their long lists of friends and risk an early case of RSI by having to click zillions of boxes to do the same job just because Facebook won’t give them the functionality they clearly want .

It’s really irritating, and if anyone has got any ideas on how to get the ‘select all friends’ functionality back, please post them up here.