UPDATE: The Remove FB Friends Spocklet has been updated. Go
here for instructions.
Too many players are quitting Mafia Wars. While the daily metrics continue to fall, most are finding an abundance of inactive mafia. The process of locating and removing these players from your Facebook and Mafia Wars accounts would be time consuming and nearly impossible if it weren't for scripts.
December 4, 2011
June 13, 2011
It's been about 6 months since I last reviewed how to get rid of your inactive mafia members. Since then, there have been changes to the Facebook side of things and those instructions no longer work. Team Spockholm has updated things on their end and have written their own script to remove players from your Facebook friends list. Before you start removing Facebook friends who no longer play Mafia Wars, you need to determine who these people are. The Mafia Manager makes this step easy. Detailed instructions on using the Mafia Manager can be found
here. Go
here for more details and tips for determining who your inactive members are. When using this tool to locate inactive mafia, the most important thing to remember is you need to have two different runs taken at the interval of your choice. The Mafia Manager will compare your two lists and determine inactive players by the amount of experience they have gained between the two runs. It's up to you to decide what a good time reference is. In the example below, I did one run on and the second on October 30th and a second on November 14th. I decided two weeks was plenty of time to determine who isn't playing anymore.
Once you have two snapshots to compare, you will want to see the players who haven't gained any experience. Click on the first "Compare with latest" link. If you click the bottom one there will be nothing to compare it to so make sure you choose the correct link. If you have done everything right and clicked on the correct snapshot, you will get several lists comparing your mafia members performance over the time period you selected. Find the "No changes to the stats" list by either scrolling down the page or click on the "all" link until you get the "inactive" category. I had 662 mafia members who did not play the game in 15 days.
Scroll to the bottom of this list and you will find the Facebook ID numbers of the inactive mafia members listed. You will need these to easily remove them from your Facebook account. Underneath the list, there is a "Copy (beta)" button. Click on it when you are ready to remove non-players.
Now that you know who is no longer playing Mafia Wars, it's time to unfriend them. Manually this could take hours. To facilitate this process, use the Remove FB Friends Spocklet. Find it on the
Spockholm Mafia Tools External Page and drag it to your bookmark toolbar.
From your bookmark toolbar, click on Remove FB Friends to activate. Remember you are using this script on the Facebook side so there is no need to unframe or do anything in your Mafia Wars game. The script works on your Facebook Friends Page.
If you activate from the wrong page, Team Spockholm will take you to the correct one and you will need to click on Remove FB Friends (from your bookmark toolbar) a second time.
Once activated on the correct page, Remove FB Friends will appear in the upper right corner of your screen. It's kind of small so you may not see it right away the first time you use it.
Now paste the Facebook IDs of the inactive mafia members found from the Mafia Manger in the tiny little box and click the "Start" button. Remove FB Friends will now unfriend those inactive players.
When the run is complete, you will finally be free of inactive players. You will notice that some of the IDs were unable to be removed. This is most likely because those players already removed you. Many who quit, go through the process of getting rid of all players who play Mafia Wars as they no longer wish to see the spam.
It's a good idea to boot these players from your mafia and you will find your game runs faster. Zynga offers a way to do this but it is very limited to just a few of them in a 48 hour time frame.
The warning notification may say that all mafia members who are not your Facebook friends will be removed but that's not the case.
662 of my mafia are no longer my Facebook friends but this method only removed 25 of them and I won't have the option again for 48 hours.
A better way is to go back to your Mafia Manager and remove them in one shot. Go to your most recent snapshot and click on the "in mafia not friends" link. Once it loads, look for the "Remove all non-friends from mafia" and click on it.
The process takes some time because it individually removes only one player at a time.
It's well worth the wait. Your game will run smoother as there won't be so much dead weight. If you worry that you will be removing players who have promoted you to their Top Mafia, either keep your inactive players or use the Link-a-Nator to get your promote link and ask your active members to promote you. Facebook only allows 5,000 friends so I like to remove inactive players to make room for those who still are still playing and will help me.
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14 days is a little short, Good players can be on holiday or just take a break .I will say a month between is more fair
ReplyDeleteAnd here is a problem as you can remove players that don't play MW any more BUT they still have you in their top mafia!
ReplyDeleteYou might loose a bouns by removing them.
tq
its so sad to see the low numbers in DAU and MAU at this rate in 12 months mafia wars will be a distant memory
ReplyDelete@Parly, those who noticed you removed them will let you know. I removed 2,600 the first time and used 2 weeks and got messages letting me know. Ideally a month would probably be better but I wanted to write the post and figured the ones who were still active would contact me.
ReplyDelete@Tq, not really a problem for players with large mafias. The max number of times you can get those bonuses is 5%. If you find you are falling below the 5% limit, post your promote link. You don't need that many to have you in their top mafia to get the max on that bonus.
Even with the new FB changes the scrubby tool still works. Ironically, I use it yesterday. Thanks for the info as allways.
ReplyDelete~Dee
Well if you remove some, and need/want to add an OLD player ( both age and time) ;-)), I would be happy and proud..
ReplyDeleteLeonard
May I know how to keep those Facebook friends that you wish to keep but not playing mafia wars anymore?
ReplyDeleteI have been keeping up with removing my mafia players who no longer play or not playing enough. I expect my mafia to be a busy daily players as I am. I do have lots of newbies, which i keep an eye on, because newbies either love it or get tired of it. Once to twice a week I am removing people both mafia and FB.
ReplyDeleteWhat about people who don't play MW but are your friends, like my daughter??
ReplyDeleteif you use mafia washer in the Battlefield..it will remove all non mafia players ...but not FB friends..i would suggest going to the profile of any your not familiar with..because you may want to delete them as friends also...many are ads...or have deleted their accounts ...or just not someone you want to be friends with...LOL
DeleteJenn, is there a way to back up the data we compiled from running Mafia Manager? As I often flush out my cache, and those data I am guessing is being stored in our browser cache; then I will not have any data to compare to 2-4 weeks down the road. Thanks!
ReplyDelete-Humphrey Chen aka Crazy Panda. :)
If you sign up for a golden toolbar account you can backup this information on spockholm's server. Go here and follow instruction's.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mafiawarslootlady.com/2011/12/spockholm-toolbar-updates-accessing.html
i tried this but it didnt remove anyone from facebook. does the script still work? :(
ReplyDeleteThe following error occurred.
ReplyDeleteSome error occured.
Did you run on an unframed MW page?
If you did, report the message below (NOT THIS TEXT) to Spockholm:
Mafia Manager v1.06
ReferenceError: $ is not defined
is there a batch process where you remove them from your mafia but not in facebook?
ReplyDeleteIn my Mafia, but not (anymore) FB-Friends
ReplyDeleteRemoving, remaining: 912
Enter your list of FB Friends to remove, that Mafia Manager Found.
Status:Removing 16485xxxxxxx (142 of 1517)
Start
Any idea if anyone managed to get the remove fb friends to work, i tried scruffy+spockholm and niether would work for me. any suggestion would be good.:)
ReplyDeleteWell This particular script file has proven to be unreliable and could really mess a player up if he/she plans to use it.
ReplyDeleteI went a got a list of players the script file said were in my mafia, but not my friends, however when I went to verify, I found quite a few members were actually still listed as my fb friend. I then went to the fb friends but not in my mafia, Jana of all people had been kind enough to accept my friends request. The script file said she was not in my mafia, so just on a whim, I tried to send her a property part and lo and behold it went through.
While it would be nice if this script worked, the reality is that with a petty much a no limit amount of gift requests you can send out and gift blaster which makes it painless, I really don't see much of a need for this mafia manager
As a side note I ran across another script or issue with the configuration module. The one stop banking does not work constantly. It has un-clicked itself for some unknown reason, it rarely says "banked X amount of $$$" yet the $$$ disappear?
Ligar59
"I went a got a list of players the script file said were in my mafia, but not my friends, however when I went to verify, I found quite a few members were actually still listed as my fb friend."
ReplyDeleteThis happened to me too, but with just one. Then I rushed and closed the script before it removed and more.
why it doesn't work at my fb?
ReplyDeleteplease advise
thank you