I Can’t Block Facebook Game Invitations? Help!

Ah, Facebook and privacy. The gift that keeps on giving. I’ve also seen exactly what you’re talking about, where you get an invitation to join a game or other interactive Facebook app, but if you try to block it, it appears to not actually exist within the Facebook world. Have they hacked Facebook and have nefarious unregistered apps? I doubt it. But it is darn annoying.

Now the adult way to handle this situation is probably just to tell the person you don’t want to play that game with them, but I completely understand the idea of blocking the game so they can’t invite you instead. It’s easier and solves the problem for all future friends too. If you have any after you shut this person down, that is. Just kidding, just kidding! 🙂

The normal way to block an app is through your Settings, but there are quite a few different ways that you can block activity if you’d prefer not to participate. Let’s have a look. To start, here’s a quiz invite I keep getting:

As you can see with the cursor pop-up, this would be a logical place to have “block app invites” but it’s not an option here. You can remove the invite, but then you’ll just get another one, so not very useful. React with a frowny face? Maybe that could work but it’s not very kind!

You can get the app name from this, however: Quiz Planet.

So let’s jump over to Settings and block that app. The fast way to get to Settings is through the tiny downward facing triangle on the top right of your window:

Once you’re on Settings then look on the left side for Blocking. Lots to check out, but stay focused, you can explore the other settings and options after we’re done blocking this game or app:

There are a lot of blocking sections from which to choose, but scroll down and you’ll find a section called Block apps. Simply type in the name of the app here and hopefully it’ll match and you can set up an app block. Except sometimes it doesn’t:

How can Quiz Planet not be on the list? Not sure, probably it has a different name in the Facebook database. But whatever the case, it’s clear that this particular utility isn’t going to solve the problem.

Fortunately there are other ways you can solve this game app block, though they’re a bit wider in impact. My favorite is to just block all app invites from someone using the (arguably questionable) logic that if they invite me to this game, they might well invite me to more games too. That’s done by moving up to “block app invites” in the same settings area:

Here you want to type in the name of the person, rather than the name of the app. Find ’em, match ’em and you can block all app invites.

Done. And that’s it, that’s how you can block game app invites even when the game app doesn’t show up on Facebook!

Pro  Tip: I’ve been writing about Facebook forever. Please check out my Facebook help area while you’re here.