I was talking to some co-workers today about the usefulness of the All Company channel in Yammer and how its annoying that it gets flooded by all the #join notifications and the “PeopleBot” welcome messages that come along with them. I get the importance of creating a welcoming community and certainly feel that Nichole and Sanjay are doing a great job at welcoming and educating new members — but with an organization this size and the fact that every 4 months a new flux of people join our campus, the fact that someone I probably don’t know joined yammer really doesn’t do anything for me except add more noise to the one channel which I consider to be one of the coolest things about Yammer.

After spending a few minutes exploring the UI and discovering some neat notifications options, I wasn’t able to find a way of disabling the notifications for myself – I must say I’m super disappointed that I can’t filter posts based on hashtags. And since I don’t have (nor want) Yammer Admin rights I don’t know if its an option from a systems point of view. With that, I did the next logical thing, I decided to write my first greasemonkey script. A light version of greasemonkey is included automatically with newer versions of Chrome!

The script, runs every 5 seconds looking for posts that contain #joined and sets their CSS Display Property to None. Its a little hacky, but it works and I consider it 30 minutes well spent.

If this sounds interesting to you feel free to grab the script at https://gist.github.com/thicknrich/e4cc2871462a6850fe8c