With recent changes in Facebook, some users may have the rare problem where you cannot add a friend to an existing friend list.
That is, when you try to add a friend to an existing friend list, Facebook will show that the friend has been added, but then Facebook will not save your changes. So if you log out or leave the page and return, then your changes disappear and Facebook does not show that your friend has been added to the friend list.
This can be pretty frustrating and there are many reasons why this may be happening, but whatever the reason, here is a solution or workaround that may fix the problem for some people.
How To Fix Friend Lists So Facebook Saves Changes
The problem is that Facebook doesn’t save your changes when you try to add friends to a friend list (an existing or old list), no matter how many times you try, or which internet browser you use.
The basic solution here is to create a new friend list, add your friends to this new friend list, copy friends from your old list to the new list, then stop using the old friend list.
If you have a large number of friends or friend lists, you may want to test this solution for a small group of friends first, to see if it works for you and/or if you really want to basically redo all of your friend lists and privacy settings.
- Log in and go to the Facebook home page. On the left side, hover the mouse pointer over “Lists”, then click “More”.
- On the lists page click “Create a List” to create a new list.
- Enter the new lists name (to replace an existing list you’re having problems with), then click “Create List”.
- Check all your privacy settings and make changesso that whatever was allowed/restricted for the old list, is now also allowed/restricted for the new list.
- Add friends to the new list. Also add friends to this new list that are already on your existing friend list (the one you were having problems adding friends to).
- To confirm that Facebook saved your friends to the new friend list, go to your Facebook profile page, then click “Friends” on the left side of the page.
- For the friends you just added to the new friend list, see which lists they now belong to. To do this, click or hover over the box next to each friend.
- You should see that your friends have been added successfully to the new friend list. For more confirmation, you can log out, then log back in, then check if your friends are still on the new friend lists.
- You can confirm the privacy settings of the new friend list by going to your profile page, and using the “View As” feature for any friend on the new list. Check if they can see what they should see, and that they can’t see what they shouldn’t see.
- When you are done copying friends from the old list to the new list, and you are done re-doing your privacy settings, then you can delete the old list. If you have problems deleting the old list, then you can hide it, so you won’t confuse it with the new friend list in the future.
New friends should now be added to your new friend lists without any issues, at least until the next time Facebook makes changes. While not an ideal solution, it does the job and allows you to continue to add, create and edit your friend lists in Facebook.