Hide Offline Contacts From Facebook Chat

Facebook fairly recently made a change to Facebook Chat that is irritating many users of the site. The chat interface, displayed in the lower right corner of the screen is now not only listing contacts who are online, but also those who are not. To make matters worse, online and offline friends are mixed in the listing. The only way to identify online contacts is the green icon next to the contact’s name.

It is not really clear why offline contacts are displayed next to online contacts there. While it is possible to send messages to offline chat partners, it is probably not something that a lot of Facebook users would want to do, as they could use the site’s messaging options instead for that.

Messages send to offline chat partners are displayed to them the next time they come online. Some Facebook users may prefer to hide offline chat partners from Facebook Chat to increase the visibility of the feature.

The following extensions and scripts let you hide all offline contacts from Facebook’s Chat window.

Firefox add-on: Tidy Facebook Chat

This add-on for the Firefox browser hides all Facebook contacts who are currently offline from the friend’s listing in the sidebar.

Google Chrome: Facebook Chat Fix

This add-on shows only online friends on Facebook in the chat bar. It furthermore hides the mini news-feed that you see on the site as well.

Userscript (Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera): Facebook Old Chat Sidebar

This one is the most sophisticated option of them all. It returns Facebook to the old chat interface. It hides offline friends, so that only online and idle friends are shown, orders friends by first name, displays the total number of online friends and groups friends by status.

That’s not all though. It automatically adjusts the size of the chat bar and makes the chat bar stick to top.

The userscript is probably the best choice as it offers more customizations and options than the browser extensions.

Improve Your Userscripts.org Experience With Userscripts

I’m not the only one who thinks that the userscripts.org website, repository for thousands of userscripts, is rather messy to work with. This can be attributed to two core factors if you ask me. First the lack of filtering options to only find scripts for a specific site or category, and second better search options that supports advanced search parameters.

A few userscripts have been created over the years that improve your experience on the site. The following userscripts help you get more out of the site without sacrificing anything.

userscripts.org Bullshit Filter

This script adds filtering options to the script listing on the site. It adds four filters to the top of the scripts listing that let you hide the following scripts:

• Games: Hides all scripts that have been created for games. This includes all the Facebook games like Mafia Wars or Kingdoms of Camelot, but also games like Travian or ConquerClub.
• Social Networks: Hides all social networking related scripts. This blocks scripts for Vkontakte, Facebook, Google+ and others.
• Non-Ascii: Hides all scripts that use non-English characters like accents or cyrillic letters.
• Clutter: Hides scripts with test or bogus titles, and scripts with titles that have less than six characters

The filters appear when you move the mouse to the scripts and filtered line at the top. Red groups are filtered by the script while green groups are not. You can change the filtering state with a left-click. The userscript is available here.

userscripts.org alternate CSS

Not all of the scripts functionality appears to be working. It does however make everything on the site a big larger, especially the fonts which some users may like. Font sizes are increased both on individual script pages and on script listing pages.

You can download the userscript here.

Both userscripts can improve your experience on the website. While they do not fix the search issue, they make sure that you get the most out of the site.

Have another script that you use to improve the site? Let everyone know about it in the comment section. (thanks Vineeth Reddy for the tip)

Add Custom Google Bar Menu Items With Google Bar+

Not everyone is seeing the new Google header bar yet that is being rolled out currently. The new header area moves the menu items that were previously linked directly on the top of the page to a new menu that is attached to the Google logo.

When you load the Google homepage you will see part of the menu expanded, with options to display additional links to Google products, services and pages with a click on the more link. A click on the actual page hides the menu on the page.

Google users who do not yet see the new menu can enable it by installing the Google Bar+ userscript. This userscript is only compatible with the Firefox web browser if Greasemonkey is installed, and with the Google Chrome browser if Tampermonkey is installed. It won’t work with Scriptish for Firefox or Google Chrome without Tampermonkey installed.

The script has more to offer than that though. A click on the profile icon in the header of the page displays two new entries that have been added by the script. The first can be used to reduce the height of the header bar on Google pages, the second to disable ads on Google.

Those three features alone are already very useful. The userscript furthermore adds options to edit any menu item in the Google Bar menu. Just right-click on a menu entry to edit it and to customize the Google bar.

This opens a menu with options to change the menu title, icon and link by either editing the values directly, or by selecting one of the preset options from the pulldown menu.

The preset buttons offer links to Google properties but also to other popular sites like Facebook, Netflix or Yahoo Mail.

If your favorite service is not in the list you can add it easily using the edit options provided by the userscript.

The only thing that is missing is an ability to move menu items around.

You can download Google Bar+ from the official userscript website.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2012. | Permalink |
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Tweetfilter, Twitter Filters And Customizations

Twitter users do not have a lot of filtering options on the official site. While it is possible to switch from timeline view to mentions or retweets, there are not a whole lot of other filtering options available. Want to filter for media tweets or replies? Then you have to use a third party Twitter software like Tweetfilter. The userscript is compatible with the majority of modern browsers and adds new filters and other customizations that are easily accessible and usable on the Twitter website.

Once installed it displays an always visible module at the lower right side on the Twitter website. The userscripts filtering options are displayed by default. Available are Twitters own filters plus filters for replies, links and media tweets. A click on one of the filtering options displays only those messages on the Twitter page.

Tweetfilter furthermore supports the creation of custom filters, for instance by keyword, username or hashtags. The system is very flexible and can be disabled or inverted at any time with a single mouse click.

Customizations are the second core feature that Tweetfilter offers. Here it is possible to configure a variety of settings that change Twitter features and what users see when they open their personal Twitter timeline.

This includes basic customizations like hiding advertising or invite friend suggestions but also more advanced features like automatically hiding the top bar, displaying alerts or hiding promoted content on Twitter.

A total of six tabs are available to configure Twitter features and modules like the timeline, dashboard or filters.

• filter independently all retweets (including classic RT-format), media, replies, Tweets with links from timelines with tweets
• custom filters for keywords, full-word (exact) match, username, mentions, hashtags, real name, source (via) with live updated match count
• shortened link expansion
• highlight Tweets mentioning you
• customize timeline layout, add via information, new menu options
• customize dashboard and aspects of the twitter.com layout gaining more space and remove distractions
• show friend status in Tweets (who you follow, who follows you)
• sound and message notification on new mentions and/or direct messages

Twitter users who hang out on Twitter’s homepage most of the time can use the Tweetfilter userscript to improve the site’s functionality significantly. Especially the filtering options come in handy for users who receive a significant amount of messages every day.

Tweetfilter can be installed from the official userscript website. The script is compatible with Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 10+, Opera 11+, Safari 5+ and Internet Explorer 9+.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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