Have You Checked Your Filtered Messages?

When’s the last time you checked Facebook Messenger? This week we read a mind-blowing article on HelloGiggles and we’re here to tell you that you might want to take a second look at your inbox (we have!).

Those familiar with Facebook Messaging know how it’s laid out: there’s your standard inbox with the messages from your friends, there is also a “message request” section (usually this is a place where messages from your non-friends show up) and then … wait for it, another layer beneath that called “filter requests.” This is apparently the place where all messages that FB has filtered out of message requests go to sit quietly without so much as a notification, to wait for you to accidentally stumble upon them.

In retrospect we shouldn’t be too surprised about this. If we’ve learned anything about Facebook, it’s that change is inevitable. In fact, this week the social media king announced that their Live feature, which is less than a year old, is adding features to make it more interactive.

While the Live changes are new, the changes to Messenger occurred several months ago, and apparently left a lot of us in the dark.

To finally see the light and read the messages you might have missed, the steps are simple. First open Messenger. Step two, find the gear then click on people, “message requests” and then “filtered requests.” Voila! You should suddenly see a flood of pretty random messages, ranging from spam to old friends checking in, etc. For most of us at OneUpWeb, it was like opening a time capsule. So many messages were totally outdated and it would be embarrassing to respond to most at this point.

That being said, not only is this an important check to do on your personal account, if you have a business page go and do this ASAP! You don’t want an opportunity to fall through the cracks because you never saw an important message.

After doing some digging in your messages, you might be asking yourself, “What happened to the place where these messages used to live, my “other” folder?” The “other” folder came with Facebook Messaging when it was first introduced in 2011. It was designed to separate your friends from “a bill and a bank statement.” Those types of messages (including non-FB friend messages) would go straight to the “other” folder. It’s weird to think about that now, but at the time, Facebook Messaging was trying to compete with Gmail; remember you could get your own email address ending with @facebook.com?

Since then the “other” folder has been a part of FB Messaging, albeit in a web-only view. In late 2015, it was removed entirely and replaced with the message requests/filtered requests option. Accessibility also changed, and now message requests/filtered requests are both Messenger and web friendly.

The takeaway from all this? Keep the filtered requests in the back of your head and check it every once in a while. You don’t want to be like me, who just discovered a message with directions to a high school open house. It probably would have been useful if I had read it in 2011.