Disable Pesky Facebook Calendar-App Notifications

Internet accounts accessible via System Preferences are great.  Everyone’s on board.  E.g.:

You can create and maintain calendars in them and they all show up in your Calendar apps on your computer and on your mobile devices.  In most cases, you create events and you create alerts for those events and you get your notifications the way you want them. Except Facebook. Sure, Facebook gives you your events and your notifications… and it even shows you events you’ve been invited to: great! What’s not so great? Your friends can create alerts on their events – events you have no intention of ever going to – events halfway across the world – and those alerts trigger on all your devices as if you created the event and set up the alert notification. Other internet accounts, like Google, draw the distinction between your events and events in others’ calendars you’re subscribed to, but did not create yourself.  There are settings in your Calendar app that allow you to ignore alerts from these subscribed calendars.  You can even choose to ignore alerts from subscribed calendars in your Facebook account’s calendar sync, but it doesn’t do anything because don’t forget, facebook adds your friends’ events to your calendar as if you created them. You’re ignoring nothing. You cannot stop the Facebook calendar notifications without turning off all notifications from every calendar in your Calendar app.

So you go about your day and your calendar alert goes off. You take a quick look and get confused about a meeting without a marked location. Then you start digging and find out it’s some event half way across the country about some distant acquaintance’s pub crawl that you got mass invited to. Then you start seeing these notifications all the time! Pretty soon, you stop looking at the alerts and you miss the reminder for your meeting that you scheduled! So annoying.

Being able to see what’s going on via Facebook events in your Calendar app is convenient when you’re looking for something to do in the context of your own schedule, so you hate to delete the Facebook calendar subscription. Luckily, I found a way to stop those pesky alerts, but still be able to see Facebook events in your Calendar app.  Here’s how it works:

Swing Event Organizers’ Advertising Pro-Tip

As you may (or may not) know, I founded the Lindy Hop and Balboa scene in Buffalo, NY back in late 2007.  SwingBuffalo.com went live that year on December 5th.  And from the start, I wanted my new scene to get a taste of what the world of Lindy Hop and Balboa had to offer, so I established what eventually came to be known as “Rhythm Shuffle“, a workshop in it’s 8th year this September.  I no longer live in Buffalo, but luckily, the scene goes on.

My focus had always been on the locals, and mainly, the beginners.  I wanted to give them the experiences I had as a beginner swing dancer, traveling to my first workshop, to inspire and excite them about what dancing could be.  I learned a lot putting on that workshop for 7 years, much of which I may post about here at some point.  I had helped out with numerous workshops in the past in other places I’d lived, but this workshop was the first one where I was calling the shots.

One thing I learned is that experienced dancers, who travel a lot for workshops 1. look for quality instruction and 2. are frugal travelers (because they travel a lot).  They are always looking for a good deal.  Well, I searched and searched and found a way to advertise to those dancers with a hook that’s hard to beat: