From Facebook Developer Wiki

[edit] Profile pics showing up in single column - started last week

In my site, profile pics are restricted to a single column (still scrollable, but the multiple column matrix view isn't working). Seems like a JS bug. Anyone see this? Repros in Firefox and Safari.

How can we disable the "skip this step" button? Or at least make it go to the URL we want?

• You can't disable it - that's the point :). It goes to the URL specified by the parent's fb:request-form action attribute.

• • Actually, it seems that it does not go to the URL specified by the parent's fb:request-form action attribute. Instead, it refreshes the page ignoring any query string information in the action attribute and without posting anything to indicate that the selection was skipped. Unless I'm missing some way to detect the "skip" button, there is no way to embed the multi-friend-selector in the middle of a multi-step flow (which is what I need to do).

But the 'Skip This Step' button is really bad UI for those apps that the user navigates to the invite page and isn't forced there. I really think it's a bad decision on Facebook's part to force this button.

• It doesn't make sense to have a "skip this step" button if you use that dialog on a page whose sole purpose is to invite people. On my app's menu I know have an "invite" tab, if people navigate to it and all it contains is that dialog, "skip this step" is meaningless. Right now I could make it redirect to the app's main page, which is very redundant since there is already a tabbed menu for that (plus I don't see how people could guess that "skip this step" is meant to redirect them to the main page). Or I can make it redirect to the current invite page, turning it into a useless "refresh this page" button. Either way, this button shouldn't be there in such a situation.

Could you at least document how to detect "skip this step" versus a valid input of IDs versus no input at all, for those of us that want a simple "invite" page rather than the intrusive annoying spammy click-through page?... I'm dumping put $_POST and not having much luck detecting the click on "skip"...

• I did it by putting ?done=1 into the action attribute. Then, instead of checking the IDs, I just do an if to check whether $_GET['done'] equals 1, and if it does, I redirect them. I hope this is of assistance to you :)
  • This seems a good way to test if a user has been through the multi-friend-selector, as the ids variable is not posted by the Skip button.

Great work by the way, I'm glad I didn't have to reinvent the wheel by making an invite page.

• Speak for yourself ;-) Thousands of apps had to!
  • I'm pretty sure "I'm glad I didn't..." means she is speaking for herself ;)

[edit] Use not in a fb:request-form

It would be very useful if I could use this tag in a regular non-invite form. This would allow me to put together a much nicer friends selector for my app. Are there any plans for this? (I agree, I am making an app now that requires a friend's profile image preview, the invite/notify box would be perfect if it didn't actually invite/request!)

• Interesting, I could imagine doing this at some point. For now though we're pretty focused on the request-form use case.
  • I would also like to see fb:multi-friend-selector available anywhere (or, perhaps, just inside a form element).

Now that the shorter-form friend selectors are available inside request-form - can we get this multi-friend-selector outside of request-form? This interface is so much nicer than building our own.

Along the same lines, it would be great to have a mulit-group-selector to allow for easy selection of one or more groups that a given user is a member of.

It seems strange to me how I'm getting spammed with invites to applications via this easy interface, but I can't use this easy interface for anything except for sending requests. I'm very interested in using this to "tag" friends in my application, not to facilitate sending them bulk invites.

[edit] Feature Request

Similar to 'exclude_ids', could we have a parameter called 'visible_ids' or similar, which would allow us to specify which ids we want present, rather than those we don't?

Could we get 'selected_ids' to preselect some ids?

Is there a reason as to why there is no option to include a set of id's in the current friend selector? It'll be nice to have a 'include_ids' parameter that would behave exactly opposite to the way the 'exclude_ids' works currently. This would allow us to design features where the user can pre-select a list of such users and invite a set of 20 from this list over however many days rather than requiring them to keep track of the set of users they actually wanted to address when they were first taken to the friend selector form.

I'd like to have a way to randomize the list of friends. It would seem to me that the people who are higher in the alphabetical order will get more invites in the current structure across all facebook apps. Since there is a input box to filter names, it shouldn't be a big deal to randomize it. -Nimit M.

Can you allow <fb:application-name /> to be used within the 'actiontext' string (so that it is interpreted to display the application's name)?

[edit] Customizing look

Can we use styles to change colors of buttons etc.? Also I would like to display some custom text next to certain people.

• It looks like you can change the class styles, but since it is a sandboxed div, all of the specific element selectors cant be used. (I've done this to move the buttons to the right of the box, and give them more padding)

[edit] UI Differences in IE vs FF / SAFARI

I've noticed that it is paginated in IE while it is scrolling in FF/Safari ... is there anyway to make that uniform so that it scrolls in all browsers?

Please disable the Skip button and replace it with close - there is really no need for it.

The Invite by E-mail address text field looks broken in FF/Safari. Missing the top border above the list of friends box. Box containing "Find Friends" and "Selected" is shorter in FF/Safari than in IE.

[edit] Multi-app user selector?

It would be nice to have a similar feature to select from a list of a particular application users which may not be necessarily the users' friends.

[edit] Mandatory margin?