Do I have to unfriend my FarmVille-obsessed friends to stop seeing their FarmVille posts and updates?

A: One of many Facebook games, FarmVille draws millions of people together to be virtual farmers, letting them grow vegetables and raise livestock without getting their hands dirty.

Unfortunately, FarmVille’s creators plug their game by notifying everybody of each player’s FarmVille accomplishments, which can turn Facebook into a compost pile. You’ll spot similar game posts if your friends are sucked into FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, or similar gaming apps.

You can tell Facebook to block posts from FarmVille and other apps fairly easily, though, letting you see all your friend’s messages except the ones automatically generated by the games.

For example, to block CityVille posts from appearing as news from all of Facebook’s virtual mayors, follow these steps on your browser: (If you own a Blackberry, read the note at the bottom of this post.)

1. Login to Facebook, and head to your Facebook News Feed.
2. Find any game post inside your news feed, like the one below, and click the X in its top right corner, seen below.



3. When the drop down menu appears, click “Hide All by CityVille,” shown below.

When the page refreshes, all the CityVille spam will have disappeared.

Repeat the process for any other automatically generated game posts you want to hide, including FarmVille, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, and similar apps.

If you miss hearing about life on your friends’ virtual worlds, bring back the notifications: Scroll down to the bottom right of your News Feed page and choose Edit Options. A window appears listing everything you’ve blocked. To unblock a game or app announcement, click the X next to the name of the banned app, and its announcements reappear.

This works for Farmville, FrontierVille, CityVille, Mafia Wars, and similar automated Facebook posts. There’s no master kill switch to remove all game posts, though; you must block each game individually. But once you block a game, it no longer appears in any of your friends’ posts.

Note for Blackberry owners: This trick doesn’t work on your Blackberry’s Facebook app, unfortunately, but there’s still a way to weed out those posts. Open the Blackberry’s Facebook app, and find the drop-down menu that lets you choose between seeing the News Feed, Status Updates, Photos and/or Links. Since the News Feed contains the posts for Farmville and other apps, turn that one off. Instead, choose Status Updates. That way you’ll only see the status updates posted by your friends — not their apps.