How to hide quiz results from your friends on Facebook

There are lots of apps in Facebook. Some of them you might like and have a lot of fun with them. Some others you find annoying as they fill your news feed from stories about your friends doing X or Y thing that you really don't care about. This is usually not a problem, as you can always mouse over such a news item and click on “Hide this application”. You are happy, and your friends are happy.

Recently, however, Facebook has been invaded by a plague of ‘Quiz’ applications that are essentially non-blockable. As any single individual “quiz question” is a different app, hiding or blocking one of such ‘quizzes’ wont prevent you from seeing all of the other quiz questions that your friends might enjoy answering in the future.

Unless Facebook does something about it, there is really no easy solution for this problem. Some sort of hack, however, is possible. For this to work you need to use Firefox and install the Greasemonkey extension. After that, you can install the Facebook Purity script that will hide from your Facebook news feed all stories from non-Facebook applications.

For me, hiding all non-Facebook applications was just too much, since there are some other applications whose messages I am happy to see. So I made a quick change to the script so that it only blocks non-Facebook apps that ‘look like’ quizzes. If someone is interested, you can install my version of the script instead.

After installing the script, on the top right corner of your Facebook homepage you will see a note from Facebook Purity letting you know how many stories have been blocked and an option to show/hide the blocked stories.

If you try it, please let me know if you find it useful, and whether it's working properly.