Help on Facebook settings, please.
 

I do not use Facebook but Pooka does.

She is about to completely delete her account, due to drama caused by a small handful of crazy people.

Personally, I am disappointed that she would let a few crazies actually CONTROL HER LIFE his way--in effect VALIDATING their nonsense. The easiest solution would be: have the ability to discern that which is harmful, and the self-preservation to maintain your own equilibrium.

Regarding whether there is a technology solution, I have suggested: ignore them. Every website (especially ones with 500 million users) should have a working IGNORE feature. She insists that there is actually no way to do this--that you can hide "their wall" but they can still post to yours, AND that you would still see everything they post if you have any mutual friends.

What??? I refuse to believe that you can't somehow just "hide" or "ignore" or "turn off" ALL COMMENTS, ANYWHERE by certain users. Maybe you have to "block" them, or "unfriend" them? But...if you still have ANY mutual friends with someone, do you really STILL SEE EVERYTHING they post? That cannot be the case.

Somebody please explain how this works.

Go into your FB "account" menu (upper right blue bar)
Select "privacy settings"
At the bottom is icon for "Block lists"

Type away

She can unfriend them, or as lamp suggests go to privacy settings, and as I have said before I feel immensely better after going here:
http://suicidemachine.org/

Deleting your account doesn't remove your previous posts, suicide machine removes your FB existence and history entirely. It's as if you were never there.

I am pretty sure you block anyone from posting who use to be a friend and reset your settings so that "friends of friends" can't see anything either. So once you de-friend those selected individuals, they really are gone from your life. You just have to figure your way around the settings.

I understand Facebook has privacy regarding who can see YOU--we don't care about that. We don't want to see THEM.

How do you do that? My wife says if we have ANY mutual friends, we will still see their posts etc. all over the place. Is that true???

As Lamplighter says, just go into privacy under settings and make use of the Block feature. Whoever you block won't be able to see you and you can't see them even if they are a friend of a friend. Obviously, if under a post, the wall says there are 10 comments and you can only see 9 for example, then you can deduce that the blocked person has written something, but you can't see what they've written or their profile. The block function does work. However, if you unblock a person, it is 24 or 48 hours before you can block them again and in that time they probably will start appearing under "people you may know".