Advice Girl Returns

Dear Advice Girl,

Do you still have your advice column blog? I need help. How do you reverse the tragic mistake of accepting friend requests from two trashy in-laws? They are treating facebook like MySpace. I am not interested in receiving the pudding they have flung at me nor comparing my knowledge of WWII tankers. I don't want their creepy sex poems showing up on my news feed. I also don't want them writing on my wall.

Dear That's Why You're Not on my Restricted List,

Thank you for allowing Advice Girl an annual update to her apparently-still-active blog account. Rest assured she has spent this sabbatical studying all the advice columns her RSS reader could handle. Unfortunately, yours is a growing problem, and Advice Girl wishes the powers that be could spend a little less time lil'-green-patching and a little more time on friend list crowd contrl. Now, everyone knows about making lists of people who only see limited aspects of your profile. What Advice Girl really wishes for, though, is a way to request being put on someone else's list. As in "Please, I don't need to see your high school banter or vaguely homophobic status updates, I just need to have a way of getting your most recent email address in case of emegerncy. Thanks." At any rate, Advice Girl has come up with three fairly unsuccessful methods of dealing with the madness, and she is happy to share these with you now.

1) Ignore and then eventually decline obscure relatives' friend requests. This usually results in their thinking that they have not yet tried to friend you and subsequent re-friending attempts. Advice Girl has not yet determined a solution for this.

2) Choosing the "Less About Trashy In-Law" option on the News Feed tab. This does, in fact, provide you with less about Trashy In-Law, but tends to leave Advice Girl with a vague sense that she's missing out on something she should know about. Even when that tends to be drunken-pics-I-was-tagged-in, she still feels it her Advice-ly duty to stay on top of these things. If only to keep her sense of superiority sharpened.

3) Actually, Advice Girl apparently only had two methods to share with you. (Advice Girl is not that good at math.) She would like to apologize for any inconvenience this shortened reading experience may have caused.

Oh wait, Advice Girl did remember her third option. Friend Pruning. Sometimes you just gotta go through and get rid of the unsightly parts of your facebook friendship tree. Best of luck.