Further Facebook friend frustration

Following up on a previous post written a few months ago, I have started to notice a new form of irritating behaviour becoming increasingly common on Facebook recently. Many friend requests are never being accepted or rejected by the recipient and are simply being left pending indefinitely, and in some cases this appears to be deliberate and intentional. It only takes a second to click the 'Accept' or 'Not now' buttons so at first I thought this was simply laziness, and to some extent it probably is but I've started to realise Facebook themselves may also be partly responsible.

To support my argument I have been regularly monitoring someone I sent a request to and have confirmed that she has accepted friend requests from other people since receiving mine that is still pending, and thus has definitely been online and seen my request. I find that extremely annoying: when accepting those requests there is no good reason why she couldn't have dealt with mine at the same time, so I just don't understand why it has been ignored and others accepted. Please people, if you don't want to be friends with someone, at least make the effort to let them know by rejecting their request and don't just leave them in suspense forever.



In some cases where requests remain pending for a week or more, it may be because the user hasn't logged into their account in that time and simply hasn't seen the request yet. On the majority of occasions though (such as the one above) I can see they have been active as they have created new public content and/or made new friends since my request was sent, so they must have seen it but consciously decided to ignore it for some reason. It takes almost no time to respond so why ignore the request and not click one of the buttons? As a result I have got into the habit of cancelling any request that has received no response after a week and then sending a new request so they get a reminder that I want to be friends with them, which may annoy them but to me is less annoying than having a request perpetually ignored.

I can see why this situation can occur unintentionally though, as the notification icon is only highlighted when the request has not been seen. Once you have clicked it and viewed the request, the notification disappears even if the request hasn't been dealt with. Certainly in my case, I will usually check out the user's profile to confirm who they are before deciding whether to accept their request, especially if they don't have a recognisable photo of themselves as their profile picture and/or use a pseudonym for whatever reason. When I see a request on my phone, I will view who it is from but if I am uncertain about their identity, as it is more difficult to view profiles on a mobile device I will wait until I have access to a computer to check their profile. However, sometimes by the time I get to a computer I have forgotten about the request as there is no further reminder, so it gets overlooked not through malice but simply through forgetfulness, but will be dealt with eventually.

By way of an update, there is another explanation for this behaviour that I hadn't thought of. Thanks to what is seemingly an oversight by Facebook, when rejecting a friend request there is no way to prevent its sender from sending another request, other than by blocking them. This means that as soon as a request is rejected a new one can immediately be sent, so to avoid this annoyance users are instead leaving the existing request pending so the person they don't want to be friends with can't send them another request. The simple solution here is to have an option to prevent further requests from this person, and I suspect something like this may actually have just been implemented without any notice whatsoever, as is typical of Facebook. I sent a request and it was declined, this user hasn't blocked me as I can still see his public profile, but I no longer have the option to send him a friend request - there is no documentation to indicate this is possible so can anyone confirm if it is indeed a new feature introduced in the last couple of days? 

There is a section where you can see all your pending friend requests, both sent and received, but it is hidden away somewhere deep within the menu and many users probably don't even know it is there - I only became aware of its existence when I googled if there was a way to view all friend requests. Mine contains something rather odd though: I sent a request to someone and never received notification that he had accepted; he appears in my friend list and on chat so everything indicates we are indeed friends, yet he is shown as a friend in my pending request list, which makes no sense and must be a Facebook glitch of some sort. 
 
I propose a very simple solution: the friend request notification icon should remain highlighted while there is at least one pending request and should only disappear once all requests have been dealt with, and the user should also receive periodic reminders (possibly by email) that they have outstanding friend requests to deal with. A similar system exists on LinkedIn: if a connection invitation is not accepted or rejected within five days a reminder email will be sent, so the same principle should be adopted by Facebook. Normally I am not in favour of nagging software but in this particular scenario it seems appropriate as the regular reminders will persuade the user to do something about the pending friend request that is causing them to be nagged rather than just ignoring it.

Follow you, follow me...

A related problem concerns 'followers', those people who are not friends but can subscribe to see your public content in their news feeds. I have followers enabled, primarily to allow me to promote this blog to a wider audience via public posts on Facebook, but there is a certain lack of control allowed over your followers. As soon as someone sends you a friend request they become a follower, and even if you reject their request they continue to be a follower. The only way to stop someone following you is to block them, which means you can't see any of their activity anywhere on Facebook. That may not be appropriate, such as the case when I had a friend request from a known troublemaker in the model bus community. I declined the request but he is still following me and can still cause trouble by commenting on my public content; I don't want to block him as I want to keep an eye on his behaviour in the various groups he is a member of, but I don't really want him following me either.

I have also found the number of followers quoted on my profile page doesn't match my list of followers: my profile says 'followed by 20 people' but my follower list only contains 15 users so I have five invisible followers, which is rather disconcerting to say the least. The follower system could certainly benefit from some improvements and what is needed is a way to better manage your follower list and prevent individuals from following you without blocking them entirely.


I'll finish with an appeal both to Facebook and to its users - if only there was a way to guarantee someone from Facebook would read and act upon this blog as I know I'm not the only one who can see the flaws in their software that they seem uninterested in fixing despite pages of complaints on their support forums.

To Facebook: please make the simple improvements to the friend and follower systems as discussed above; for the sake of a few small changes you can create a more pleasant user experience.
To users: when you receive a friend request, please don't just ignore it but be sure to accept or reject it within a reasonable timescale and don't leave it forever in limbo.