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4 Tips To Find a Friend Whose Chat is Off on Facebook

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Facebook chat was once considered as the most worst chat of all but today, they have become a great tool for communicating with friends and clients. Earlier in 2009, when I joined Facebook, the site didn't contained a chat history feature. All chat messages were not recorded for people to view them later. The Inbox feature and Chat feature was a separate things as per Facebook. Private messages worked just like an email and a chat included a window which just appeared as an interface for people to communicate. Today, all the conversation we do in a chat window is recorded and the Messages work together with it. Let us see how to find a friend whose chat is off on Facebook.

It's ironical when your close friend turns off his or her chat. Is it that, he or she doesn't want to chat with you? Or, he or she have some important work? As a friend, we used to question them for the reason to turn off the chat. Trusted friends reveal the truth while it's not the same with few other people.

It is much interesting to tell your friend that he or she is online while his or her chat is off. You can find this in three different ways.

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#1 Last Active Time

Mobile site gives the exact time of when a user has been active on Facebook. When you want someone whether they are online or not, land on mbasic.facebook.com or m.facebook.com; go to messages and look at the last active time. If you suspect in this, then refresh the page after a minute, you can notice that the last active time should be updated to most recent.

The below picture shows when their chat is turned off.

After a refresh of the same page, the last active time shows as the picture shown below.

If the user had a mobile icon near their name, you can also find the last active time on the desktop site. If they don't you may need to depend on mobile site only.

The desktop site shows the 1m period as a minimum time for last activity whereas a mobile site shows the exact time with seconds.

#2 Use Ticker

Ticker on Facebook reveals the real-time activity performed by your friends. Though they turn off the chat, they forget that their online presence might be revealed if they like or comment on any post. Ticker might be helpful to find a Facebook addict whose chat is off.

#3 Chat Seen Feature

Some people just read the message sent by you. They won't be aware of the "Seen" feature which exists on Facebook. Send some message to a friend whom you are suspecting to be online. While they read the message, you get a notification that they have seen the message. You can now catch them red-handed.

#4 Using PHP scripts

Edit: Feels like I escalated much? Thank you LondonNoodles! A Reddit user noticed that this method is advanced for a noob. Yes, of course it is advanced. Using PHP scripts require Apache server. This method may find easier who has experience already working with web hosting. If you are puzzled about this and trying to make this trick work, you need following prerequisites.

A free web hosting

You can sign up for free hosting with 000webhost.com or GoogieHost.com or similar free web hosting company. Once you sign up, you will be getting a sub domain for free. Go to file manager and upload the file that we will be creating in the public_html directory.

Still, this is a killer method that works!

It is not much important to suspect a person whether he or she is online or not but in cases, you might really want them to complete a work. In that case, you may create a file called visit.php on your server and copy this script to it.

<?php

$i = "Visited";

$file = fopen("log.txt","a");

fwrite($file,$i);

fclose($file);

echo "<center>Thank you!</center>";

?>

After uploading, whenever a user visits the page visit.php, the text file will contain a text called "Visited". If the page is visited twice, it gets recorded twice. So, be careful with this. After testing the script, you may delete the log.txt file which is created or remember the times, the text "Visited" has repeated.

Tip: To make them click the page you've uploaded, you may share the link on Facebook with the privacy setting so that only the person you want to find online could visit them. Add a catchy link description to make anyone click.

Would you like to share any other trick to find a friend whose chat is off? Please comment below and be nice. Do share this article if you have liked it.