Sick of Facebook Candy Crush invites? Mark Zuckerberg says they’re working on it

Having already revealed a bunch of new sentiment buttons to appease the millions of people who had asked for a “dislike button,” Facebook is turning its attention to one of the next most frequently requested features: an easy way to block all those darn invites to play Candy Crush Saga.

Taking to the stage for a Townhall Q&A at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, India, today, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook is finally working on a solution to the problem. Zuckerberg had observed that the Candy Crush blight was the most upvoted question in an online thread, so he decided to act.

“I sent a message to the person who runs the team in charge of our developer platform, and I said that by the time I do this Townhall Q&A, it would be good if we had a solution to this problem,” said Zuckerberg. “She emailed me later that night, and said there are some tools — that are kind of outdated — that allow people to send invitations to people who’ve never used a game, and don’t play games on Facebook. We hadn’t prioritized shutting that down, we just had other priorities. But if this is the top thing that people care about, we’ll prioritize that and do it. So we’re doing it!”

Zuckerberg gave no hint as to when this will happen, or in what form. It’s fair to say that Facebook won’t be closing down the entire Candy Crush Saga invite system, but it will make it harder for people to pester friends with unwanted invitations.

At the same event today, Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that its “Free Basic” Internet.org program has helped 15 million people around the world get online, and he also explained why Facebook is showing so much interest in India.