Just hide it

My first solution was just hide the post with CSS display:none, when I still ran it with JavaScript Injector and jQuery. It was an easy task, my first commit had only 12 lines of code. You can check the whole code there.

Remove DOM element

When I turned FunBlocker in a Chrome Extension, I decided not to depend on jQuery, because it will run in background of Facebook and should not slow down the timeline performance. Or maybe I decided that because I never had programmed these basic things without jQuery.

So, I find a link in a post I want to remove from the DOM.

<!-- Facebook HTML posts tree looks like this -->
<ul>
    <li>
        <div class="storyContent">
            [your friend sharing some shit here]
            <a>Page I do not want here</a>
        </div>
    </li>
</ul>

I search for links and get the parent element with class containing storyContent. After that, I call remove_story:

function remove_story(story) {
    var node = story;
    var parent = node.parentNode;
    while (parent.tagName != 'UL') {
        var tmp = parent;
        parent = parent.parentNode;
        node = tmp;
    }
    parent.removeChild(node);
}

It was more code than my first version, but I learnt a lot without the jQuery dependency. At this moment, I had 62 lines of code on GitHub.

Click Hide Story

Facebook has an option in menu to remove the content from your timeline. How can I use it? Without jQuery it is not a streight forward task. The code below do almost the same thing than $(element).click().

var event_ = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
event_.initEvent("click", true, true); // event type, bubbling, cancelable
if (element) { // element is the link I want to click
    element.dispatchEvent(event_);
}

Yes, sometimes it works. Other times Facebook just do not have the link I want because it is dinamically loaded. To solve this problem, I want to trigger the loading and after that click the button I need.

I preferred another approach.

Mimic Facebook

I know the click discussed above trigger some action to Facebook servers. The Hide Story button triggers a HTTP call to https://www.facebook.com/ajax/feed/filter_action/uninteresting/?__a=1 with some trick parameters. If I do the same thing, everything works.

After some research and reverse engineering in Facebook messages, JavaScript and HTML, I understanded a bit about what are these parameters and how to do this one call to Facebook.

To be honest, I do not know how exactly it works, but it is there and makes my timeline better everyday. If you need something like that, take a look at try_default_hide function. I spent some days to solve this problem and did not found documentation about it.