Facebook has many applications and user-friendly tools which allow you to get in touch with, talk to and share with your friends, Facebook chat among them. If you’re familiar with Instant Messaging, and many people are, Facebook chat is the same thing. If you’re not familiar with it, Facebook chat allows you to converse with your friends online. While many people love chatting online, others find popup chat requests to be a nuisance, especially when they’re logged in for mere moments or online with the intention of doing something without the interruption of a chat request.
If you are uninterested in chatting with people while you are on Facebook, is there are way to appear invisible and therefore unavailable to chat? If you want to stop chat requests, it’s easy to do. Just follow these instructions.
1) Log on to your Facebook account. Once you are logged in, look for the chat bar and the notepad at the bottom right hand corner of your browser. The number next to ‘Chat’ is the number of people on your friends list who are online and available to chat on Facebook and the notebook with the red number is your notifications bar.
2) Click on the icon that says “Chat #”. It should pop up with a list of the people you know that are online when you are. Look to the top of this list, and you will see two different bars. One will say “Friends list”, the second says “Options”.
3) Click on Options. A drop down menu should appear.
4) Click “Go Offline”, the first option on the drop down menu, and you will be logged off Facebook chat and appear to be offline. Going offline doesn’t log you out of Facebook, it simply makes you invisible and therefore unavailable to chat.
5) Once you’re offline, you won’t be able to see which of your friends are online. To get back online, simply click on the “Chat” bar at the bottom again. Once you’ve done this, you are automatically logged back in. Your list of friends who are also online will pop up.
If you do not click the chat bar again Facebook will remember your setting and keep you offline until you choose to go back online with Facebook chat.