SFC: A History

As Sharing Foals and Calves celebrates its One Year Anniversary, Farmer Brown recounts some of the history of Sharing Foals and Calves, the successes, the failures, the memories, and the future of FarmVille Link Sharing.

Part One: The History


June 3, 2010

Farmer Astrid Schenk becomes frustrated with the inability of her neighbors to collect the foals she's been breeding for them.  Many go in mere seconds, thanks in part to the popularity of a relatively new gizmo from Gamers Unite called the Snag Bar.  Although this tool has only been out for a few months, it has proven to be very effective - too effective.  She decides that it's time to share in an environment where she can be assured that whoever collects her foals are actually collecting them because they're playing the game and not asleep while some gadget just grabs everything it can.

Going to Facebook, she creates a group: Sharing Foals and Calfs.[sic]

The group is based on a simple premise: friends can share foals and calves with each other in a semi-private environment, they don't have to scour the Facebook feed to find what they want (most of it is gone at this point anyway, thanks to the snaggers), and they can socialize and interact with each other a little more.  Finally people will have a better chance of getting that rare foal or calf for their farm that they've always wanted!

She invites all of her friends to join, including Farmer Brown.

June 4, 2010

New Facebook Groups format to replace all existing groups

In an Official blog post from Facebook earlier this week, Facebook announced that all existing groups under the 'old' format (such as Sharing Foals and Calves) will soon be 'upgraded' to the new group format. If you belong to ANY Facebook Groups, you need to read this.

The new group format features several distinct changes from the way the 'old' groups operate.  

Facebook Security Glitch in Groups

It's not REALLY a secret, but we got your attention, huh?
This is important stuff to understand, folks!

There's been some sort of change in the way Facebook posts group activity to your own wall, and it impacts the group security of our FarmVille Link-Sharing Groups.

In a nutshell, this glitch allows you to view the wall of a group member on your friends list, and view their postings to that group, including comments and links posted, even if you may not be a group member.  Previously you could see these posts, but could not click-through to the original group posting.

Got Snaggers?

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is "How do you deal with people who use the snag bar?".

Are you being snagged?  If you don't like it, solve it!

Well....it depends, and it's purely subjective.  Some 'Insane Snag Bar Users' (people who really tend to overdo the whole snagging thing - we pretty much know who they are) are also nice people, and you may want to keep them on your list because they're entertaining or informative.  Of course, the easiest way to deal with anyone who you feel is abusing your game feed is to simply remove them from your friends' list.  Problem solved.

A more creative way to keep them on your Facebook Friends List (but to block them from game posts you feel they may be snagging) is through the use of Facebook Lists and Custom Security on individual posts.

In order to do this, you first need to create a list of people from whom you'd like to block your game posts.

Removing Unwanted Games and Applications on Facebook

If you get infected with a rogue application (i.e., the 'trojans' you get from clicking on scam posts, etc.), this is the way to remove them from your account.  Be sure to bookmark this entry in case you need to refer back to it, and feel free to share it with your friends

- we all need to clean our our apps and remove games we don't play anymore - it helps you and it helps the rest of us so that we can focus our efforts on helping people who actually do play the games!
Sooner or later, we all get tired of playing some of the games on Facebook.  We tire of seeing and ignoring the requests for the games, the posts going past us and cramming up our newsfeed, etc.

Sometimes, we also inadvertently allow a rogue or bad application to do things in our name like make posts while we're not looking, advertise a service or scam, etc.

Note: A lot of people are hesitant to completely remove a game from their account because they don't want to lose all the progress they've made on the game.  Zynga keeps your game intact for at least 6 months after you remove it, in case you change your mind and want to go back to it....but frankly if you go 6 months and don't play it, you probably don't want to go back and play it at all anyway.  6 months is a LIFETIME in the gaming world, so at that point you may as well start over again anyway, and reap the benefits they pass out to new players, no?

Well, it's a new year and it's time to clean up our Facebook applications.  Not only will this make our accounts safer, but it will really help out our fellow gamers, since removing an application removes your name from the players list.  Your friends will thank you for not wasting their precious 'sends' for things like invitations, free gifts, and other game play in which you need to participate.

So...let's remove some games we don't play anymore, and get rid of some annoying applications we don't need or want around.  To do this, start by going to http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications

This brings up a screen which looks similar to this:

How to post a FarmVille shared link to a group

This may help some of you master the technique of posting links to Facebook groups. Good luck!

R.I.P. Nursery Barn 2010-2010

I'm about to delete my Nursery Barn.  


After much thought and consideration, I've decided that this contraption is simply something for lower-level farmers to use to get some breeding experience, a couple horses to breed from for free, and store a bunch of the foals and calves that randomly litter so many farms in FarmVille.


See, here's my problem with the Nursery:  It produces very little for the time it took to build and for what it produces.  Just not a good return on investment for something that takes up so much screen space.


It's a very cute concept.  Who doesn't love the fantasy idea of taking little babies and having them grow up into adults?  Of course, these adults are apparently already pregnant and deliver to you 5 foals or 10 calves to share - that never made any sense to me, but we're talking about FarmVille here.  


I've concluded, however, that to the FarmVille farmer who is serious about leveling up quickly, and accumulating coins and XP, those 7x9 units of space can be used to plant high dollar crops or house things (like your chicken coop) which have a far better ROI.

Want to share the Sharing Foals and Calves Group?

Here's the easy way to tell others about the Sharing Foals and Calves Group on Facebook:

Go to the group home page, located here: http://tinyurl.com/SFCGROUP

Scroll to the bottom of the page. As an active member, you'll see this screen:



Click on the share button, and post to your profile.

NEW MEMBERS will see this:



They just click on Request to Join, and an Administrator from the group will be in touch with them and approve their request. Easy, no?