Neat Facebook Chat Hacks To Keep You Enjoying IM Via Facebook [Weekly Facebook Tips]

Facebook chat is one of those things that’s fantastic when everything is going well, yet very annoying when something’s not right. Sadly, most people don’t have the time to navigate all of the options and set their preferences just so.

There’s also a number of useful tricks and Facebook hacks you can do with chat messages that many people just don’t realise is possible. That’s why today we’re going to quickly run through some of the most useful Facebook chat hacks for you. We’ll have you set up comfortably in no time.

Forward Facebook Chat Messages

There are a number of reasons you may need to forward chat messages, but very few people realise that it’s in fact possible. To do it, go to your Facebook Messages screen and highlight a conversation with a particular friend. In the top right, there’s a menu with a gear icon and “Actions“. Click on that and choose “Forward Messages“, then you’ll be able to choose which items of the full chat history to forward.

You can forward these to either a Facebook user or an email address.

Filter Who Sees You Online In Facebook Chat

Chatting to friends on Facebook can be great, if they’re the friends you wanted to catch up with. If you’re always getting hassled by workmates or other acquaintances, then maybe it’s worth setting a few things up to ensure they only see you online when you actually want to chat.

You may or may not already know that it’s possible to filter who can see you online in Facebook chat. There are two ways of going about it: either with a blacklist or a whitelist. Both the blacklist and the whitelist can be made up of individuals or friends lists. So, you can choose to chat with anyone except people on list xyz. Or, you can choose to only chat to people on list abc. It’s your choice how you do it. All you need to do then is make an appropriate friends list to suit your needs.

To make changes to your Facebook Chat settings, head to the bottom right of your Facebook Chat and click on the gear icon, choosing “Advanced Settings“. From there, you’ll be able to either enter friends you DO want to chat to or friends you DON’T want to chat to. I’ve chosen to make lists of acquaintances and people I don’t normally want to chat to, thus leaving myself open to chat with anyone else on my friends list.

You may choose to do it the other way around and only chat to your best friends.

For more on how to set up filters for Facebook chat, check out this article to Decide Which Facebook Friends See You Online & Which Don’t, The Easy Way.

Hide Offline Friends In Facebook Chat

For some reason, certain friends will always show up in Facebook chat regardless of whether they’re online or not. If this bugs you, there’s a Chrome extension to fix this, which simply hides all the people who are currently offline.

Disable Read Receipts In Facebook Chat

If you don’t want your friends to know that you’ve seen a certain message, you can disable read receipts using a handy browser extension called Chat Undetected. It’s available for Firefox and Chrome.

Turn Off Chat By Default

To turn off Facebook chat, head to the gear icon at the bottom of Facebook Chat and choose “Turn Off Chat” from the menu (or turn it back on again using the same method). It’s also possible to turn off Facebook chat by default using the “Advanced Settings” from the same menu, then choosing “Turn Off Chat“.

Turn Off Facebook Chat Sounds

Again, all you need to do is head to the gear icon at the bottom of Facebook Chat and un-check “Chat Sounds”. No more annoying notification sounds!

Hopefully, your Facebook Chat is now very well set up and ready to make your life a pleasure rather than a pain. What else would you like to see Facebook chat do?

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