In early July, Facebook started beta testing a side bar feature that they termed the Happening Now Side Bar. Those who were unfortunate enough to get it found it very irritating. I told you about the feature
here. Now that it's mainstream to most players, the questions are pouring in and the annoying factor has increased. Before we get to how to remove the thing, let's take a closer look at what it is and what it's designed to do. Facebook is now calling it the App Ticker. You will only see it when you are using one of your Facebook Apps. It serves a few purposes. One is to present the applications you most commonly use and have them as bookmarks so you can easily jump from one application to another. The next is to let you know what your friends are playing. It claims to be in real time but testing this proved not to be true.
The bookmarks will also show how many game requests you currently have by a little red number in the upper right corner. This information is also not accurate and didn't come close to matching how many pending requests I had in Mafia Wars.
The "real time" news flashes will say "Joe Blow is playing Mafia Wars". I know, how give a flip. If you want more detailed information about what your friends are up to, hover you mouse over the application bookmark you are interested in and you will see what they are doing in Mafia Wars. Wow, I just found out that some of my mafia members want me to be part of their Brazil Crew. How exciting!
If you missed some of your ticker reports, have no fear because you can hover your mouse to the far right and a scroll bar will appear.
If you want to remove one of the applications from appearing on the ticker, in theory, you can do that too. The trick is to get an X to appear. If you hover your mouse in the upper right corner of the post, it's suppose to appear. I was able to do this for some of the applications but I couldn't get the X to appear for Mafia Wars. Maybe you need to be playing a different game. I'm not 100% sure. Anyways, look for the X and click on it.
That will remove the application from appearing in your ticker and Facebook wants to know why you removed it. There is no "It's irritating the crap out of me" option.
You will also notice that there are sponsored adds in your ticker. Here is one letting me know that two of my friends used the Marketplace. Obviously Zynga is paying for this. I knew one of these players and he told me that he hasn't purchased Reward Points in over 7 months. I'm sure just visiting the Marketplace will trigger this.
Now the big concern for many players is they don't want others to know when they are playing Mafia Wars. Let's face it, most of us are freaks when it comes to this game and it wouldn't look cool to our real life friends to see we continue to waste our time. There is a solution. Go to you Application Settings from the Account Drop Bar.
Now choose Applications located in the upper left hand corner of the page.
Go to the application you don't want people to see in their tickers and click "Edit".
Now scroll down to "App privacy" and click on the drop down menu.
Open it up and select "Customize".
Now open up another drop down menu under the heading "Make this visible to".
Select "Only Me" and then "Save Setting". You will no longer appear in any tickers except your own. If you use other applications, you will need to do this for each one.
Facebook does answer some of the questions you may have about what this thing is and how to manage it. Here are three common questions and Facebook's responses.
What's new in the right column for games and apps?
How does the app ticker work?
How do I control which of my information shows up in the app ticker?
Many players really hate this thing and find it annoying. Some people with medical conditions such as epilepsy find it dangerous. There are ways to get rid of it. I will go over several workarounds starting from the most basic to the most sophisticated. Susan Wells of THX suggested throwing a towel over the right side of your screen. This wasn't a good option because the towel kept falling off and often interfered with my key strokes.
Zynga Customer Support is recommending that players go to mafiawars.com to play. This is a good solution but I always forget to go there and just enter through Facebook. You won't see the app ticker but you will see their advertisements. You would think they could sell their own ads and not need to use Google Ad Sense.
The next and most practical option is to just play the game unframed. This is the one I use as I always play unframed anyways. The app ticker hasn't really gotten on my nerves.
There are a few scripts out there that will remove the app ticker. The easiest one is a Chrome Extension. Go
here to try it out. Thanks to Peta from [AMEX] for finding this.
It worked great for me and the app ticker along with all my ads were removed from the Facebook page.
Manage it like any other extension. Use the little wrench in the upper right corner of your screen and select "Tool" and then "Extensions". You can turn it on or off as you choose by using the Disable and Enable links.
For Fire Fox users there is also an Add-On
here. I haven't tested this one out as I can't stand to use FireFox.
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