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
maybe the script should run the Hide Conversation action?
Hide Conversation
I think that the irrelevant level will continue to rise in in All Company.
It seems to need a swipe to hide/keep action.
I think the approved way to get Yammer to work right is participate socially, liking and hiding. I presume that after doing that a bit that using the Home > Top feed might do something useful like suppressing posts (in this case, topics) that you hide frequently.
One really scary thing about Yammer is that you can change or add a topic (#tag) to pretty much anything, notes, files, replies.
Richard,
I hope you dont mind me sharing your code on StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24773558/how-do-i-hide-posts-with-a-specific-hashtag-in-yammer/34868062#34868062).
Regards,
Krishna
Awesome. Glad its useful.
Hi Richard,
Really appreciate you sharing this script as I find it incredibly useful in our environment. A new manager has seen our Yammer membership jump exponentially, and each day the ratio of “#joined” posts to “real” posts sees the former outnumber the latter by 15 to 1 sometimes.
One tip I do have; in Chrome Version 50.0.2661.94 m (Windows), having added the extension I’ve found that the next time the browser is opened (next day in my case) Chrome throws a warning about the extension being added and hard-disables it, preventing it’s re-activation.
Rather than having to keep deleting and re-installing it each day, I did some research and found that if you use “Tampermonkey”, which is a user script management extension for Chrome, to execute your script, it is not blocked by Chrome, as Tampermonkey is a recognised Google Chrome Web Store extension.
You’d think by now you’d be able to tell Chrome what extension(s) you wanted to keep, if they were non-web store ones, like “self-signing” them or something, but hey… *sigh*
Would you be happy for me to submit your script to Tampermonkey to help spread it around (I’ll ensure you are credited and provide a link back to your blog where possible etc).
Tampermonkey can be found at https://tampermonkey.net/ and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/ [string]
Thanks again and regards.
James Watson