A quick round-up of some helping hands for a better Facebook experience:

* the vital Facebook Purity plugin has just gone to version 18, restoring blocking of “Sponsored” ad posts in timelines.

* a new Greasemonkey script, Facebook Demetricator tweaks all the fairly pointless “View 33 comments”, “Posted 25 minutes ago” micro-messages and suchlike. Instead you just see a much more relaxed format such as “View comments”, “Posted recently” etc.

* new to me, Unseen for Facebook. Prevents your Web browser from pinging a “Seen” message to Facebook, when you open a message sent via a chat box. Possibly especially useful if your employer starts to use Facebook messaging for business purposes, when you only use Facebook for personal matters.