2024 Update
It seems Facebook Text Delights are now defunct, disabled and dead. Instead of fixing this feature, Meta has instead just removed it. When I test in a browser or in the mobile app, text delight phrases do nothing.
I’ll leave my original post below, for posterity.
When using Facebook, you may notice that certain phrases and words automagically take on color. And when you click/tap those special-looking words, a fun animation occurs, with a sound effect. These are Facebook Text Delights.
And it seems that Facebook users either love them or hate them. Sure, they can be a lot of fun in casual posts or comments. Facebook Text Delights are innocent and mostly harmless. But here are some common criticisms:
- They are unreliable. Some people report that they do not work in the Faebook mobile app. Others type in a text delight phrase, and see no change or effect, until after the post is finalized. And I’ve seen a few instances where someone creates a Facebook Text Delight, only for it to revert to plain boring text after the Post button is clicked.
- They cannot be disabled. It used to be that you could type a phrase, see that it colored in and became a delight, and then press the Backspace key one time to eliminate the delight-effect. That tip no longer works. If you have entered anything that Facebook considers to be a Text Delight phrase, it will show its special effect, unless you deliberately misspell it!
- There’s no master list of Facebook Text Delights for us to consult. Many blogs and news sites will help you read lists of what will “add delight” to a Facebook post, but none are definitive, and Facebook adds and eliminates delight-phrases without informing anyone. For example, “best wishes” used to be a Facebook Text Delight, but it no longer triggers any fancy effects for me.
Facebook Support hasn’t given me any feedback on the future of their Text Delights, so I don’t have any optimistic details for you yet. But some advice:
- Review everything that you post or comment to Facebook. If you intended to post a Text Delight, you might want to notice if it actually appeared or not. If you don’t want a text delight, please be aware that things like “You’re the Best” and XOXO may color in and show cartoonish effects, after you post it.
- If you want to suppress a Text Delight, you’ll have to get creative. If you don’t want “Wonderful time” to turn blue and give you a thumbs-up, change it to “lovely time”. Try to avoid the balloons of “Congratulations” by misspelling it as “congradulations”. Instead of entering “You Got This”, try “You. Got. This.”
That doesn’t work. I see some people are able to get rid of the despicable “text delights,” that aren’t “delights” at all, but this isn’t the answer to get rid of them when they happen.
Gadzooks! You are right, the backspace trick no longer works! It did at the time of this writing, but no longer. I shall look into this and update the blog entry accordingly. Thank you for letting me know!
Not only can I not backspace to remove the delight, it seems text delights are broken, as well. When I type “congrats” and “xoxo” into a new post, it highlights and looks animated. But after I click Post, the text is plain and ordinary. Is that happening for you as well? I’m testing with multiple personal accounts over here, and can’t get the text delights to work on a computer.
mine will do the same thing wish it was fixed I enjoy all of the delights
Me 2
For me, the opposite is VERY unfortunately the case; I typed a message with a ‘text delight’ word staying the standard black text after I’d typed it… but upon posting the message, the font color of said word automatically transformed to being red.
I’m in full agreement with Linda, who made the first reply post in this thread… I absolutely DESPISE the damn things. Leave what I TYPE the hell alone, Facebook.
Unfortunately, my text delights aren’t broken at all, even in foreign languages! A Facebook friend uses her Korean name on her page, and today’s her birthday, so I found out how to wish her a Happy Birthday in Korean. The ‘birthday’ part of the greeting turned red, and animated balloons popped up. I used to be able to change the font color in the ‘Inspect’ setting (highlight offending word, right click, click inspect.) But it either doesn’t work the way it used to, or Facebook won’t allow me to change it. By the way, originally there used to be an ‘x’ available as soon as the word changed color so that you could get rid of the color if you wanted to by clicking the ‘x’. I’m so sick of Facebook deciding for me what I can or cannot see and what I can or cannot do. I really wish there was a viable alternative. Sadly, there isn’t.
Is the poster (or anyone) notified when you tap on the animation, perhaps by accident?
No, if you can get a text delight to work, it’s just on your screen. It’s not designed to notify anyone.
Does not work for me, if I tap backspace the colour disappears, but so does the last letter of the word, so that’s not really helpful.
Right, and I’m sorry, but the Text Delights have been unreliable for some months now. They work for some, not for others, and the original ability of being able to backspace them into submission doesn’t work at this time. And I can’t get any clear info about it from Facebook.
I wish mine would break.
Here’s what I posted re Text Delights a few months ago…
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If there’s anything more inane than Facebook’s “text delights” as an automatic feature you can’t back out of, it’s doing a FB post search on the topic and coming up with nothing but posts on how neat text delights are, about how you can click on them and Wow! Animated balloons and fist bumps! It’s like FB/Meta is trying to flush out everyone but the dumbest yokels with tacky-greeting-card McTaste who operate on the level of easily excited toddlers.
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Really. Get rid of them as an automatic, you-can’t-opt-out-of-it default, *period*. It makes FB look like it’s operating on a cheesy supermarket-tabloid, “who buys this stuff?!?” level. (Unless that’s the point: that is, they’re targeting the easiest marks for the kind of sponsored spamvertising and disinfo that’s given FB a bad rep)
For our company it’s even worse. I work in the mental health sector. In Dutch, that is known as GGZ. This is also an abbreviation that Facebook uses for “good game”. Amongst others, we treat young people with a gaming addiction. Serious business that needs no text delights.