Wishlist: Option to limit Facebook status to filters

[Mary Gardiner]

This is related to the request in bug 395054.

Facebook allows the creation of custom 'filters' containing different friends. It would be great to have the following features:
 - each filter presented as a possible view in the Account Tree
 - ability to get FB updates in the main 'Messages' view only from selected filters

[Ronald McCollam (fader)]

This is something that is frequently asked about in Answers:
Question 100774: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/100774
Question 97614: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/97614
Question 97425: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/97425
Question 94357: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/94357
Question 89034: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/89034
Question 87205: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/87205
Question 80948: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/80948
Question 78644: https://answers.launchpad.net/gwibber/+question/78644

I poked around a bit but couldn't find any information about this. Could someone who knows whether this is on the roadmap or not maybe put something about it in the FAQ?

(Personally I'd love to see this, as without it Facebook support in Gwibber is less than useless, but even an acknowledgement that it's a known issue would be great.)

[Michael Martin-Smucker (mmartinsmucker)]

I nearly reported a similar (perhaps the same) issue, but chose to subscribe myself to this one instead. I'm assuming that 'filters' is referring to (or at least related to) Facebook friend 'Lists.' I have my friends divided into two lists: those I'd like to hear updates from, and those I wouldn't. This keeps my Facebook homepage pretty manageable, and it would be nice if the Facebook section of Gwibber would also be this readable.

[Ryan Kelln (ryankelln)]

To repost from a different, semi-related question (https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gwibber/+question/91489):

You can get the filters from facebook, for example I added this code to facebook.py:
self.facebook.filters = self.facebook.stream.getFilters(self.facebook.session_key)
These look like:
{u'filter_key': u'nf', u'is_visible': True, u'uid': 614255489, u'icon_url': u'http://www.facebook.com/images/app_icons/newsfeed.gif', u'rank': 0, u'value': None, u'type': u'newsfeed', u'name': u'News Feed'}

This list should include other custom filters you have made (although I haven't tried it) and it would be simple to request messages with a filter in place. Someone just needs to create the UI to do this.

[Ryan Paul (segphault)]

This feature is planned for version 3.0. I'm leaning towards putting combobox in the account configuration dialog that will let users select a filter to apply to their Facebook stream. I might also make the filters accessible through the navigation sidebar along with user lists.