Now you just need to kill the "you've got a new blog message" message. 

RF, if you're referring to the notifications you get from registration when someone has commented on your blog, if you go to your inbox and click on "inbox settings," you can set comment notifications ("new comments"), private messages (send a message), and friend invites to go to only your on-site personal inbox, if you wish.

And congrats to Michele1075 and RF as our first "early adopters" of the friend updates.  :)

This is a test

You have a problem.  I posted that while not signed in.

I tried posting a comment while signed out, because I noticed that you created a blog setting that allows "frrom anyone" or "only registered users."

When I posted without being signed in, I got a screen saying that I needed to be signed in.  When I signed in, the comment that I posted while signed out appeared anyway.

ApolloDawn, I just tried to replicate your test.  I logged out, wrote a test comment, entered the captcha, and hit submit.  I was sent to the login prompt.  Instead of entering it, I didn't want the test to actually post, so I clicked back until I got to the People page where I'd logged out.  I logged in, went to the post, and found that my comment had then posted--but I had logged in.  Your name and profile pic are displaying with both of your comments.  Is this what happened to you?  It's not possible to post a comment without logging in.

That is what happened to me.  It displayed what I had posted while signed out, after I signed in.

I just read your comment that you posted while I was responding to you, ApolloDawn.  That's what the system does by design.  If you remember from before we instituted that fix, if someone was not logged in and wrote a comment, submitted it and was prompted to log in, then the comment was lost.  This prompted a lot of folks to always copy their text before submitting, on the off chance that they weren't logged in at the moment but didn't know it.

I didn't know there was any such fix.  I did not know it was by design.  It seemed unusual to me, so I thought it might be a problem related to this new change.

Thanks for looking out, ApolloDawn!

You're welcome, and I am sorry about the false alarm.

Funny. I never actually thought Bakersfield.com would actually cross the line into full-blown social networking. It's kind of interesting, I guess. I've always had fun with status updates on Facebook. But of course, I can write more personal things on Facebook that can't be seen outside my circle of friends. I know that's an option on here, but the point is there are some things I can't say on here that I can on Facebook.

The only glitch I have noticed so far, Jason, is that I have received friend status updates from people I have actually deleted from my friends list. So for some reason the status updater still has those people on my friends list and lets me know when they've updated their status. But I did check my friends list and they were definitely deleted, so that's not a problem. I just thought I'd share that with you.

If the Friend list is going to mean something now, maybe we ought to clean our Friend lists of those people who do nothing but spam the whole community with invites.

I just looked at the block users feature.  It makes no sense at all.

I haven't written any blog posts, so it doesn't affect me, but why does the block user feature only allow you to block "friends"??  I can't block users who are NOT friends???

Maybe I'm dumb, but if I were going to block a user, that user would not be a friend.

Robin, we're looking into the issue of defriended accounts' updates still appearing in your inbox--thanks for letting us know.  Also, re: your comfortability on Facebook vs. here vis-a-vis updates, remember, you can choose who on your friend list sees your updates.

Pawn, thank you--with any new feature launch, there's always finetuning to be done, especially with how we communicate usability to the user.  Your comments, and others, will help us change language and add language re: how to use these new features, as well as tweak their usability.

But to your point:  The language on that "block users" page is misleading, and we need to change it.  Here's how you block stuff from someone.  Unfortunately, right now, you must receive something from them--a notification of a comment on your blog, a "send a message" message, a friend update, a friend invite.  (Notice that only the update requires that you're already friends with the person.)  In your inbox, click on the message from the user, and you'll arrive on a page with that message, and above it are a bunch of buttons allow you to respond in different ways.  One of them is a "block" button.  If you click it, you get a dialog box:

What do you want want to block user _____ from doing?

Block all Communications
Prevent user from sending me messages
Prevent user from signing my guestbook
Don't notify me when the user comments on my blog
Don't notify me when the user updates his or her friend status.

So, you see, you CAN block someone you're not friends with, and you CAN block friend updates from someone who's on your friends list but whose updates you don't want to see.

Please, continue to let us know about bugs, things working (or not working) strangely, usability problems, etc., and thank you.