Facebook's secret feature change

I'm sure many of you will agree that a lot of the changes Facebook make don't improve the user experience at all, and I have been very critical of them, but for once they have actually made a beneficial change that is genuinely useful and solves a real issue. However, they seem to have neglected to tell anyone about it as the majority of users haven't realised anything has changed and the problematic behaviour it was supposed to prevent is still occurring so I feel more attention needs to be drawn to this change. It affects what happens when you reject a friend request: that person now no longer has the ability to send you another request so you won't be bombarded by those annoying persistent users who keep sending a new request every time you reject one, and this should have put an end to that irritating practice of friend requests being left pending indefinitely.


I discovered this change purely by accident when I realised someone had rejected my friend request and noticed the 'Add Friend' button was missing from his profile page even though we have mutual friends. This is at odds with Facebook's own documentation that indicates, even at the most restricted settings, anyone with mutual friends can always send a friend request without exception. Searching failed to find an explanation so I asked about this in the Facebook help forum and so far my question has been viewed almost a thousand times and received 42 votes for being a good question, meaning there must be many users who have discovered this and want to know the explanation.

As Facebook don't generally make proper date-stamped announcements of feature changes it is impossible to tell exactly when this was implemented, but I first noticed it in mid-September. Even now, at least three months on, the majority of users seem completely unaware of it and friend requests are still being ignored as they think rejecting them will lead to a new request being sent. Now this long-overdue improvement has been made, friend requests can be rejected safe in the knowledge that the person you don't want to be friends with can't bother you with further requests, and there is no need whatsoever to ignore them. Isn't that a good thing so why haven't Facebook made any effort to promote it? 

There is apparently one small official acknowledgement of this behaviour. Tucked away somewhere deep within the FAQs is a short sentence that says "Privacy settings may limit your ability to see the Add Friend button on some people's profiles. Also, once you’ve sent someone a friend request, you can't send them another one.", but this appears to be the only reference to it. I have never actually managed to locate this text myself though and am only aware of it because another user quoted it as a reply to my question. I shouldn't really have even had to ask that question as friend requests are an important part of the Facebook user experience that should be fully explained very prominently in the documentation.

The policy has even been applied retrospectively to those users who rejected a friend request from you before it was implemented, as I have now lost the ability I did have to send a request to somebody who rejected one over a year ago. As there is no indication to the contrary, the restriction appears to be permanent, which seems a little draconian: what happens if circumstances change in the future and we decide we do want to be friends? I don't know what happens in relation to the other party though: does anyone know if they still have the ability to send a friend request to someone they have previously rejected an incoming request from?

Although generally a welcome improvement, I can see one drawback to this new behaviour in relation to the activity log. It doesn't sit well with the (in my opinion misguided) policy of removing friend requests that you sent but were rejected from your activity log. If you visit someone's profile and forget you had sent them a friend request, there is no apparent explanation for the missing 'Add Friend' button as the activity log no longer contains any evidence that the friend request was ever sent. Why should rejected requests (or any other activity for that matter) be removed from the activity log anyway? They are activities that did actually happen and the activity log is supposed to provide a record of ALL your activities, so once an activity has been logged it should stay there, but Facebook seem to have an obsession with providing exclusively what they consider to be 'positive user experiences' and hiding anything perceived as negative.

Maybe instead of hiding the 'Add Friend' button completely, it should be replaced with a message along the lines of "You can't send this user a friend request because you've previously sent one" to make it clear why the option isn't available. If you don't believe me, take a look at the screenshot of someone who rejected my friend request. We have mutual friends but I can't send a friend request - according to Facebook's own docs this combination isn't even possible!

Where has the 'Add Friend' button gone? Now you know.

In summary: if you reject a friend request that person will not be able to send you another so there is no need to ignore requests from people you don't want to be friends with. This is a big step in the right direction so I can't understand why Facebook haven't publicised it and I hope by writing about it I have done what Facebook themselves have failed to do and drawn more attention to this useful improvement.