How can I create a MySpace Message Me button?

It certainly seems to me that it should be doable, though I'm a bit baffled why you would want to have a nice button for "block me". I mean, do you find that your friends, or, um, former friends, are blocking you that frequently that you'd want a button for that particular task available?

To quote the MySpace help, "Blocked users can still view your profile, but they cannot send you a message or communicate with you. If you do not want them to see your profile, you can adjust your privacy settings." I'll assume you have some reason to make it easy for people to want to block you.

One thing to correct here in the beginning is that the button you want to create is "Block User", not "Block Me", though once you are almost done tweaking the code I'll show shortly, you'll be able to change the label as desired.

The first step, once you've logged in to your MySpace account, is to click on "Profile" in your MySpace Control Panel:

The next page you see will have a lot of edit boxes, but the link you want is on the top right, the View My Profile link:

Now you should be viewing your profile as someone else would see it, and just below your picture should be a "Contacting" box, like this:

(well, your contact box might not be quite the same as mine. Quite likely it has a white background rather than my fancy profile. The good news is that you can learn how to customize your profile too with the myspace help offered throughout this site)

Just about there. The next step is to right click (or, if you're a Mac user, option-click) on the "Send Message" link and choose Copy Link. The URL you get will look something like this:

You can axe out the junk after "MyToken=", so in fact the trimmed URL looks like this:

While we're here, scribble down or otherwise save your friendID. Mine, as you can see here, is 65108791.

To produce a button like what I showed in my earlier article you need to unwrap the link and make it a little HTML form. Or just let me do the work!

Here's what you need:

Simply substitute your own friendID value and paste the modified code onto your Web page, Facebook profile, or whereever else you might like.

Now, back to that Block User link. Turns out that this exact same technique will work fine and the code above is almost exactly what you need. Instead of it invoking "mail.message" as the "fuseaction", however, we need "block.BlockUser":

That's all there is to it. Good luck with your tweaks. Curious about the other options? Looks like fuseaction could also be "invite.addfriend_verify", "groups.addtogroup", "mail.forward", "user.addToFavorite" and RateImage.UserRating". Hack away. :-)

Oh, and if you'd like, I invite you to check out my own MySpace profile too.