There are some "fan pages" on Facebook that have a witty image, saying, or link, and they make you become a fan to be able to see it. Personally, I never became a fan of any of these, because I don't like paying for something when I don't know what I'm paying for. In this case, I'm paying with my fanhood, and with my personal info. So, I'd like to know what I'm becoming a fan of.

Now, remember all the scandals about Facebook's poor privacy protection? Apparently it goes both ways. Not only is the user's information insecure, but the pages, too. I don't know if this is a problem with the way the pages are supported in Facebook, or a problem with the people who write the pages just doing stupid stuff, but something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Basically Facebook's privacy policies. If you ask for one, you can have a piece of cardboard to hide behind.

What's going on, is that the image/text/link/etc that only fans see is actually loaded into the page, but it is hidden by default. When you become a fan, it activates a script every time that un-hides the hidden image. One solution is to just disable all CSS styling on the page, so stuff that's supposed to be hidden is shown, but that ruins the Facebook styling, too.

I came up with somewhat of a simpler way: copy paste the text below into your address bar and hit Enter.

Now, it's an unwise idea to use arbitrary code like that from anyone, even if he is your local lovable open source nerd. Reason is, some people write malicious code in there and you may be using it without knowing. So, here's a step-by-step explanation of what my code does:

// Create an appear() function to call to make stuff appear
function appear() {
    // Get a list of all <span> HTML elements.
    // I've found it's most often hidden in a span element.
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('span');
    // Loop over all the spans
    for(var i in s)
      // Try to set the visibility to visible
      try { s[i].style['visibility']='visible';}
      // If it couldn't, then there's no style element, so it's the wrong one
      // So, do nothing
      catch(e){};
    // End function
    return;
}
// Call our function;
appear();

The reason I have to define a function is to have the null return at the end. If I simply did the code up front, it would just give me a page saying "visible" because Javascript tries really hard to return something at the end of every function.

So, there it is. I think it's possible to make a bookmark with the line of code above, too, to just have a one-click access to the shortcut. Edit: Have a link to drag to your bookmarks bar, thanks to jwalsh for the idea:

Enjoy!

Note: I normally wouldn't publish shortcuts like this, but I personally think that the people who make these pages are jerks trying to stock up the most fans for some sort of e-peen need, abusing the fact that most people are too lazy to un-fan something. Even worse are the ones who put a link to their hastily-created blogspot blog with a million "scroll down to see it!!" and then a disappointment at the end. So, I write this in hopes that people will only fan them if they really deserve it.