How to Remove Your “Wall” on Facebook

I’ve become more of a fan of Facebook over recent months (see my profile). They have made a number of improvements that I really like, and the number of people joining the service seems to just increase more and more over time. I’m really amazed at home many people you can find on it. I think they are well on their way to being the de facto White Pages of the Internet.

With that said, I don’t like the Wall feature of Facebook at all. For whatever reason, I’m just not real hip on anybody coming to my profile and just typing away. I’ve turned my wall off for a long time, and enough people have commented to me “Hey, you don’t have a wall! How did you do that?” that I thought I would share how to remove your wall.

Now, to be clear, we are not removing the wall per se. Facebook will not allow you to remove the Wall application. Instead, we are going to adjust privacy settings to hide the wall entirely. First, go to your privacy settings.

Now click on your profile.

In this screen, scroll down a ways and you will find the “Wall Posts” section. Simply change your settings to look like this. Uncheck the “Friends may post to my Wall” box and change the privacy option.

You could set this so that only you can write on your wall if you want. There are a couple of different options. I have it set like above which effectively removes the wall.

[Jan. 8, 2009: I've gotten some questions from people saying this doesn't work. I think the challenge is catching the result. I'm adding this section to help illustrate what this does.]

Result

Now that you have made this change you probably want to check to make sure it worked. This is a little hard on Facebook since it’s not terribly easy for you to see your profile as someone else. Facebook does have a feature that allows you to test this out, in your Profile Privacy settings, where you changed your wall privacy options, you can type the name of a friend and see your profile as they would see it. This works great for testing, particularly if you are using Facebook groups to assign privacy levels differently for various people.

You may be confused that even after these changes your profile will still have a tab called “Wall”. That is impossible to remove, per my earlier comment that we cannot really remove the Wall. It’s integral to the functioning of Facebook. All we did was remove the ability for people to write stuff on it.

Before these changes this is how a friend would see your wall.

Note the option to Write on the wall. After making these changes a friend sees your wall like this.

The option of writing on your wall is gone now.