How do I enable Facebook On This Day Notifications?

[Note: this is an update to an earlier article to reflect that Facebook has made things a bit more confusing. As they sometimes do]

When Facebook rolled out the On This Day feature, it showed up as a message box at the top of my news feed, a prompt asking me if I wanted to have historical posts show up on a regular basis. I opted in, because I find that it’s fun to have these sort of flashbacks, but if you didn’t notice the message, didn’t get it, or didn’t respond “yes”, does that mean you’re out of luck on Facebook?

Of course not. Sort of.

The trick is that it’s considered a Facebook application and part of the notification system, hidden under a sequence of clicks. But I’ve got your back, so let’s dig into the confusing world of Facebook settings and figure out how you can enable your own On This Day feature.

To start, it might be as easy as going to the right URL. Try going to http://www.facebook.com/onthisday

When I go to that URL, I get the On This Day feature:

Of course, if you don’t have the feature enabled in the first place, it’s unlikely to just show up.

Click on the dark blue downward-facing triangle on the top right of your Facebook page instead, bringing up the following menu:

As you can see, the option you want to choose is “Settings“. Do that and you’ll get to a page with a lot of options.

The specific one you want (on the left side) is “Notifications“. Click on that and you’ll see this:

Almost there. Now click where it says “On Facebook” to bring up the list of notifications you get when you’re using Facebook from your computer. About half-way down you’ll see what you seek:

My setting for “On This Day” is “On”. Yours is “Off”. Change it, and you should be good to go!

Now, what were you doing one, two, three, four years ago on this day on Facebook?

Note: Some people report that they simply don’t have “On This Day” in their Notifications area on Facebook. Clicking on the URL results in the message “This feature is not yet available to all users”, which is a bit weird since it was released in April 2015. Is it an app? When I look through my own Facebook enabled apps list, I don’t see anything by that name. Unsure what’s going on, because Facebook doesn’t seem to have any definitive answers either. Perhaps it’s just a glitch that some people still don’t have this feature. Which stinks.