If you’ve ever created a Facebook event, then you know it can be hard to invite more than a few friends at a time. Thankfully there’s a new way to easily invite almost all your friends in two clicks. Don’t want to receive event invites? You can also block them.
Facebook events are a great way of letting everyone know about upcoming happenings. Simply create your event, add pertinent details like time and location, upload an appropriate picture, and your work is basically done. It’s a lot more reliable than inviting people by email, and a lot less work than the snail mail method.
The thing about Facebook invites is that at least until recently, you could only invite multiple friends by separately clicking each one at a time. This is pretty tedious because sometimes when organizing a large event, you want to invite all your friends in the area, and that could be several dozen or hundred people.
Understand, we’re not advocating inviting friends en masse to events on Facebook. The social network has enough features to gripe about (game and app invitations, as well as annoying birthday and other notifications come to mind), but for many event organizers, the option to invite all (almost) your friends is a great, timesaving feature.
Inviting Almost All Your Friends in Two Clicks
The addition of a “Select All” button for Facebook invites now makes it easy to invite large groups of several dozen or several hundred friends.
Just click “Select All” in the top-right corner of a list of friends, and then click “Invite.”
This probably isn’t appropriate for intimate gatherings where you’re only inviting a select few buds, but for stuff like community activities and big functions like sporting events, it’s an addition that’s long overdue.
It should be noted, however, that this option does not appear on the “All Friends” category. We’re fairly sure that this is so people can’t potentially invite hundreds or thousands of Facebook users with the click of two buttons.
Limiting “Select All” to suggested friends, regions, recent events, or groups with similar interests, means the feature has less spamability and likelihood for abuse.
That said, we know how annoying it is to get a lot of event invites from Facebook friends (or entities) that have no real impact or bearing on our lives. What do we care about some gathering or party on the other side of the country?
Blocking Event Invites
If you get a lot of event invitations for things you’ve no interest in (or ability to even attend), then they can be very annoying.
You can block event invites, but only from specific friends, which is fine because chances are it’s only one or two individuals who’re abusing the system.
First, open your Facebook settings.
Then click on the “Blocking” link from the choices on the left.
You want to scroll down to “Block event invites” to which you can type the name of a friend to prevent them from sending you event invites.
If your intention is to just put your unruly friend in timeout, then you can go back later and “Unblock” them. Regardless, the feature is there for you to use at your convenience.
Unfortunately, it won’t let you block every single future event invite but more than likely, that’s becoming increasingly unnecessary (unless you just have a lot of friends who like to invite you to a lot of events) now that you can invite all your suggested friends, which is more than likely the only people you want to invite in the first place.
Do you have any comments you’d like to add, or questions you want to ask? Please take a moment to leave your feedback in our discussion forum.
