How To Hide Facebook Questions on Facebook.com
One of the more annoying things on Facebook.com as of late is a relatively new feature called Facebook Questions. It basically allows anyone on Facebook to create polls.
These polls then appear not only on your own Facebook wall, but also on the news feed of your friends, which can be pretty annoying when a lot of friends create new questions regularly, or like to answer them.
Some Facebook users like to hide Facebook Questions because of that. Facebook itself has no option to do disable the polls feature, which means it is up to userscripts and browser add-ons to do just that.
Update: Facebook seems to have pulled the questions option at least from brand pages in 2012 and announced the removal in 2013 officially. According to the announcement, users should simply post a question and get answers in the comment section about it.
Here is a collection of tools to block polls from appearing on your Facebook news feed.
Userscripts to hide Facebook Questions
The Facebook Questions Remover userscript hides all Facebook questions occurrences on Facebook, regardless of where they appear. Google Chrome users can install the userscript right away, Firefox users need to install an extension like Greasemonkey or Scriptish first before they can install and use the userscript.
The extension removes not only the questions and polls, but also the links on Facebook to create questions and polls in first place. The script may be compatible with other browsers, including Opera and Internet Explorer.
Update: It has not been updated since 2011 and appears to be no longer working because of this.
Google Chrome extensions
The Hide Facebook Questions Google Chrome extension hides all questions on Facebook.com, so that they do not appear in a user's news feed nor on other pages. [link]
Alternatives: Kill Facebook Questions, also for Chrome
Firefox extensions
Facebook Purity for the Firefox web browser may look like overkill to some, as it offers a lot more than just hiding questions on Facebook. You can use it to turn Facebook upside down, make all kinds of changes. That said, it can be used to hide questions effectively everywhere on Facebook. [link]
Facebook Purity is actually available for Chrome, Opera and Safari as well, making it almost universally usable.
Alternatives: Feed Filter is another Firefox extension to manage what appears on your news feed on Facebook. You can use it to hide lots of stuff, including "asked a question" and "answered a question" news.
Multi-browser options
Better Facebook is an extension that is available for virtually every web browser with the exception of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It is definitely overkill if you only use it to disable questions on Facebook, but if you have other annoyances then this one may be the best option for you.
The tools above should provide all Facebook users with enough options to hide questions and polls on Facebook. If you know of another tool let me know in the comments.
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thanks you saved my 1000 tabs :)
Fantastic! Thank you! This worked like a charm. Had exactly the same issue in Firefox on a PC and this fixed it.
Thank you for sharing this! Like you, I’d noticed that disabling/re-enabling the extension would work for that browser session, but I hadn’t tried anything yet to force a fix. I’m SO glad it was this easy!
I sure hope the OneTab team issues an official fix ASAP, though. Now that it’s been a few days, they’re starting to get bad reviews, which is unfortunate.
Yes! I also tried the workaround. I also reported this bug to OneTab team on the first day I faced this issue.
Thanks, Ashwin for the fix!
I was nearing desperation when I found your direction. It worked.
Thank you so much.
Hi, OneTab developer here. Sorry for this – it’s not clear why this bug is suddenly happening for some people, but we’re urgently investigating this with the Mozilla/Firefox team and will be providing a fix very shortly.
Thank you so much for sharing this fix! You saved my tabs. The only note/point I would like to add is for Step 2.
Perhaps put a note stating they should copy Step 3 and forward of your tutorial to Word. Once we close Firefox, we lose visibility to your tutorial. For me, I know I would not be able to remember the .bkp.
Again, thank you!
Easy temporary fix: To make OneTab work again, type “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar. Then find OneTab in the list of extensions, and click the blue toggle button twice. This will disable and then re-enable OneTab, and cause it to work again.
We’re working with Mozilla for a permanent fix. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is a very strange issue that is only affecting the Firefox version of OneTab.
I have found by disabling and then re-enable in the add on menu I get my tab back. Short term fix. Will try yours.
Thank you. I thought I had lost a month of digging. I’ll be a little more attentive about exporting the urls from the extension list now. It’s a great tool but Firefox doesn’t always play nice with its extensions.
Good news – I’ve been working with Mozilla all morning to resolve this. Mozilla have confirmed it was due to a bug in Firefox (related to extension permissions downgrades).
To fix OneTab, just go to “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar, click the ‘cog’ icon in the top right, and click ‘Check for updates’. This will upgrade you to OneTab v1.39, which fixes the issue.
Darn, I tried everything here and I still can’t get my tabs back. I even did a full system restore to a point last week hoping that my saved tabs would be in the old .xpi file, but no luck.
I’m pretty disappointed :(
Probably I should’ve been more patient, but now I don’t know how to feel about this. I lost about 900 tabs in the recovery process (I reinstalled OneTab), which, incredible as it sounds, weren’t all just a messy dump I’m never going back to, but actually important stuff (yeah, I have a peculiar workflow).
Trying to suppress the anger and reflecting on what happened, it seems I should blame myself for not having a backup. But surely I couldn’t back it up manually every time I save a tab, it would defy all purpose of having this addon in the first place. A couple of years ago data was stored at “~/.mozilla/firefox/%PROFILE%/jetpack/[email protected]/simple-storage”, and you could back it up with simple crontab. This is no longer the case, this folder is just empty. And since OneTab is closed-source black box, I couldn’t have done anything else as well.
So the only reasonable lesson to be learned is that I actually must stop relying on OneTab, since sooner or later it will let me down again. Fuck it.
I just disable and re-enable. No tabs lost!
I switched from OneTab to Tab Stash (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/) months ago and haven’t looked back. I had never experienced any data loss with OneTab, although I was a bit concerned by some reports of data loss I read about. My main issue was with OneTabs performance, it’s a hog. I had been looking for a replacement and testing out a ton of addons for a couple of months when I finally discovered Tab Stash, and am damn glad I did. I really can’t recommend it strongly enough…
Thanks, bsdaddict. Never tried it, looks nice, but I’m a bit concerned by small number of stashed tabs on these screenshots, not sure if it’d be usable when stashing a lot of tabs. How many tabs do you usually have stashed?
Tab Stash is is a great alternative to One Tab, y’all… I made the switch months ago and am very happy with it.
>DO THIS FIRST: Before trying the following fix, I recommend disabling OneTab and re-enabling it from the about:addons page, to access and regain your tabs.
Worked for me! Many, many thanks!
I know it’s late but ist there an option for chrome on android tablets aswell? My wife hates it that the search bar and Tab list will just come Up again when she Scrolls up
You are truly a hero and a scholar, sir or madam. I salute you!