You can now remove things from Facebook’s shortcut bar, including the red dots

Every once in a while, Facebook adds a feature or option that people actually need. This is one of those happy times. 

The social network now lets you edit your shortcut bar in its iOS app, meaning you can erase individual items from the bar or forbid them from showing the red notification dots, TechCrunch reported Monday. 

I’ve tried it out on the latest version of iOS, and it works, though it’s not entirely intuitive. Long press on an item in the shortcut bar (at the bottom of the app), and you’ll get a pop-up menu allowing you to remove an item or turn the notification dots on or off. Note, however, that long pressing the Home, Profile, and More icons will get you nothing — it only works on items in between those icons, such as Groups, News, Marketplace, Profile, and Watch. 

If you want to re-add some of these items to your shortcuts bar, you’ll find the option by tapping More (three lines in the lower right corner), then navigating to Settings & Privacy – Settings – Shortcuts bar. And in Settings & Privacy – Settings – Notification dots, you’ll find more options for enabling or disabling the red notification dots. 

Frankly, this is a great feature. As a big proponent of inbox zero, I keep all my notifications and unread emails at zero whenever possible, and constantly getting notifications for something that’s not really relevant to my interest (a random post on Marketplace or a new video by some Page) was annoying. If only Twitter would follow suit and stopped notifying me about random new posts on its network, that would be great. 

Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature has rolled to everyone on iOS and should be coming to Android in the next few weeks.