Remove Inactive Mafia From Your FB Friends List

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UPDATE: Go here for updated instructions to remove friends from your Facebook account. The Scruffy tool outlined in this post no longer works.

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It's no secret that many people have quit playing Mafia Wars. It may not directly affect your game but the impact on you is a growing list of Facebook friends who no longer play Mafia Wars. We all want a way to easily identify these people and remove them as friends. By combining a few scripts, you can do this with very little effort on your part. Pistol Pete will discuss this method on the next episode of The Informant Podcast. I decided to try it out and was quite pleased with my results.

The best and easiest way to tell who isn't playing Mafia Wars is to run the Mafia Manager by Team Spockholm. If you haven't tried this tool yet, you can find instructions here. The Mafia Manager will provide a list of all your inactive mafia members. Activity is based on a gain in experience points. The time interval of inactivity is determined by you. If you don't have two Mafia Manager runs to compare activity, run one now and come back to this project at a later date. Once your second run is complete, go to where is says "Show:" and click on the links until you get the inactive category.

Once the inactive category is showing, click on the "Compare with latest" link of your first Mafia Manager run. If you click on the latest link, there won't be anything to compare it to and all of your mafia members will be listed as inactive. You need to have a decent time interval to determine inactivity. In the example below, my scans were 13 days apart.

All of your inactive mafia members will now appear on one list. I was surprised to learn I had 2,015 inactives!

You could go to each listed members Facebook profile page by using the first link and remove them as a friend, but who has time for that? If you scroll to the bottom of the list, you will find a box that contains all the Facebook ID's of the players on your inactive list. This will come into play and be used later.

The next tool you will need to install is called PRemoveFBFriends by Scruffy's Mafia Wars Bookmarklets. With a list of Facebook ID's, it will automatically remove them for you eliminating the need for you to go to each page, scroll, click to "unfriend" and verify.

Follow the instructions below to install and use this tool.

1. Go to the Scruffy's Mafia Wars Bookmarklets Page and locate the PRemoveFBFriends bookmarklet.

2. Click, drag and drop the PRemoveFBFriends into your bookmarklet toolbar. The dragable bookmarklet is listed to the left of the purple arrow inside the bookmarklet information box.

3. Click on the purple arrow to get more information about the tool.

4. Go to your Facebook Friends Page by clicking on "Friends" under your profile image.

5. Click on "Edit Friends".

6. Click on the drop down menu and choose "All Friends". A list of all of your Facebook friends will now appear.

7. From your bookmark toolbar, click on the PRemoveFBFriends. A pink box will appear in the upper left hand corner.

8. Go to your Mafia Manager list referenced above and highlight and copy the list of inactive Facebook ID numbers. Make sure your cursor is inside the box or it will copy the links. You want the ID numbers located at the bottom of the list.

9. Click on the white box located in PRemoveFBFriends and paste the list in there.

10.  Click "Start" and wait for PRemoveFBFriends to delete all of your inactive mafia members from your Facebook friends list. If yu have a lot, this can take a while. I noticed I got an "Unknown error" box that wouldn't close but this didn't seem to affect the task at hand.

11. When the run is finished, it will say "Done" at the bottom of the script. You can see 2015 of my Facebook friends were removed.

12.  I was close to 5,000 friends and now I have 3,265. The numbers didn't match exactly because some of the ID numbers from the Mafia Manager had already been removed.

Once you do this, you will be left with a lot of mafia members who are no longer your Facebook friends. In theory, they should be easy to remove as there is a "Remove Non-Friends From My Mafia" link in the game. The problem with this is once you utilize it, it only removes so many and doesn't return for 48 hours.

I didn't have much luck. I was hoping a big chuck of my recently removed Facebook friends would be cleared from my mafia. Only one was removed and my remove non-friends link disappeared. Thanks Zynga, things were going great until you got involved!

Team Spockholm has updated the Mafia Manager to include a feature which will remove non-friends from your mafia. If you don't have that many, you can always manually remove by clicking on the red "remove" link and they will be gone. Mafia Manager will then say "removed" in green so you don't lose track of where you were.

To automate the removal of non-friends in your mafia, follow the instructions below.

1. Run the Mafia Manager by Team Spockholm. For instructions on using this tool, go here. You will notice a "in mafia not friends" category has been added.

2. Click on "in mafia not friends" and you will get a list of all of your mafia members who aren't your Facebook friends. Find the link above the list that says "Remove all non-friends from mafia" and click on it. Mafia Manager will remove them for you.

4. Wait for the run to finish. You can watch it do it's thing and there is a countdown. I had 2,553 non-friend mafia members so it took awhile. If you already removed the person since your last Mafia Manager scan, it will say "failed". When the person is successfully removed from your mafia, it will say "removed" in green.

The method of removing Facebook friends only applies to friends that are in your mafia. A list of Facebook friends who aren't in your mafia can also be pulled from the Mafia Manager by selecting the "Show friends not in mafia" link.

Scroll to the bottom of the list to get the FB ID's and remove them in the same manner as outlined for inactive mafia members.

I had 238 on this list and now they are gone. Many have been there forever since they always ignored my mafia invites.

Thanks to Pistol Pete for discussing this method on the Informant Podcast and thanks to Eike for updating the Mafia Manager so it would be compatible with the PRemoveFBFriends bookmarklet.

Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law