Monday, August 08, 2011

How to leave a facebook network

*** EDITED: Unfortunately this solution does not seem to work at this stage as facebook seems to have changed their code to prevent people from being removed from their primary network. I encourage you to report this to them by filling out this form and they might eventually do it for you: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=profile_bug. As a workaround, you may choose a different network, that you are ok to keep, then you can remove your old network. If anyone reading this has a solution, please feel free to comment below. I'm however keeping the original post for the sake of history tracking. ***

I might be an exception, but it did disturb me a lot to have the name of a network added under my name in facebook when looking in friend lists, such as my friend's friend list, or when you open the link of the list of people who liked a post... etc. You might just want to get rid of your primary network for other reasons (one of the simplest, not part of it anymore), but to be honest, when I tried to remove this annoying network name from below my name, I did not find a solution up until today.

Not sure how it was before, but today if you have only one network, that one has to be your primary, no matter what. Once you made a network your primary, for some odd reason, you cannot leave that anymore; the 'Leave network' button that was there before you made your network primary simply disappears, even from the code behind apparently.

After some time searching for it, giving up and then just really wanting to find a solution, I finally stumbled upon an excellent post from Varenya Mehta VM that did not address my issue directly but had the solution to my issue in it too. The post addresses Facebook's "You are already a member of this network" Bug, however going through it up until point 6 then applying the javascript solution, I could actually leave my primary network on facebook.

Important note: I could only use the javascript solution (update #2 of the above post) as I do not use Firefox but Chrome instead. This solution only worked for me if adding the javascript into the console of Chrome's Developer Tool (and not in the address line, as the above post suggests).

I know it might not be easy for less technically savvy people to apply the solution, so feel free to AskMe if you have questions, I'm happy to help you out!

14 comments:

  1. nice blog matis :)
    btw thanks for acknowledgement.

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  2. @varenya: thanks!
    you do merit the acknowledgement! ;)

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  3. Seems the comments on the linked page indicate that the fix no longer works and I have been unable to make it work. Still trying to just remove a primary network and not wanting to have any other network. Are there changes to how this is supposed to work?

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  4. @Anonymous: there is no problem with this solution, I just tried it a few days ago and this solution has also been added to forum threads on facebook with many positive feedbacks. If you still face issues, please write down what you don't understand or at which step of the described solution you are stuck and we will try to help you out. You may add your comments here or AskMe separately.

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  5. works a charm, thanks a ton!

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  6. @Anonymous: really happy I could help ;)

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  7. edit_network_dialog.php is producing a 404 page

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  8. @Devon: as you can see, I edited the post stating the solution doesn't work, sorry about that, but the blame is on facebook ;)

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  9. FACEBOOK HAVE NOW ADDED A REMOVE NETWORK BUTTON!!!

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  10. @Anonymous: it sounds good, I'll test this and confirm soon, thanks for the heads up!

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  11. YES!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

    To leave a supported network:
    -Open the Account dropdown menu at the top right corner of Facebook and choose Account Settings.
    -Click Edit next to Networks.
    -Click Remove next to the network name you wish to remove.
    -Click Save Changes.

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  12. @Devon: sorry to only publish your comment now, but I was actually trying to testing the removal of a network without success. However, let me point it out that this article was addressing a situation where you could not remove regional networks. In the mean time, and according to you (I cannot confirm as I stopped messing with networks due to the above) it seems facebook has put the remove button back, most probably due to the big number of complaints.

    Anyway, thanks for the headsup! ;)

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  13. Webeno... Here's my situation. I have two networks. One is my School and another is my City. I want to leave my City network. I follow the basic steps of "LEAVE NETWORK" but it comes right back.

    Do you have any solution. Thanks!!

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  14. @Anonymous: as you have not left your email I can only hope (for you) that you are checking back on this post to see my answer. The point is, as you can see at the very beginning of my post, facebook has changed their code and I have not tested any further solutions since that. Just talking from experience, I recently left my work networks and had no problems at all. I suggest you contact facebook directly with your issue using the URL I provided in the post (http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=profile_bug). Hope they will be able to resolve your issue.

    Good luck!

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