r/sysadmin • u/Szeraax IT Manager • Aug 16 '22

Rant Dear MS Teams: Someone liking my comment in my active chat should not cause a notification in my "Activity" panel that can only be cleared by activating that panel

Please, you're making me die on the inside. I no longer use the reactions for other peoples' messages so that they don't have to go clear it.

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u/mrjackspade Aug 17 '22

It's stops loading messages when I'm away too.

I have to work in a VM that only supports one monitor, so I frequently do research outside the VM. After a few minutes outside the VM it will set me to idle. I'll click back in the VM after a few hours of work, and suddenly it will load a fuck ton of messages from people trying to get in touch with me.

It's fucking garbage

1

u/ov3rcl0ck Aug 17 '22

Ever heard of autohotkey? I bet there's a script that will activate that window at specified intervals and do something to keep it active. It's a really cool program. I use it to do a lot of things.

2

u/Frothyleet Aug 17 '22

Alternatively you can use something like caffeine: https://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/

Sends something like scroll lock every 59s

1

u/ov3rcl0ck Aug 17 '22

My company only allows ahk. I'm lucky they even allow ahk. I stumbled upon it one day while going through the website of permitted software and installed it since it was free without knowing what it was or what it did. Then one Friday I needed a mental floss break and looked it up. Holy cow it's so cool.

1

u/mrjackspade Aug 17 '22

I'm really tempted to do something like that. Really close. I'm hoping to hold out for a solution that doesn't actually mimic KB/M input. At some point I want to try sending WM to teams and just send it garbage and see if that resolves it.

I have this really weird paranoia that if I'm mimicking user input, I'm gonna switch windows at the exact wrong time and mess something up.

5

u/bem13 Linux Admin Aug 17 '22

I just run this in PowerShell. It sends a Shift key every 60 seconds:

New-Object -com "Wscript.Shell" | %{while($_) {$_.sendkeys("+");Start-Sleep -Seconds 60}}

It can be annoying, for example if I'm holding Ctrl when it happens to send a Shift, it changes keyboard layouts, or vim can do stupid stuff because of it, but stopping it when I'm doing work and starting it again later isn't that much effort.

1

u/ov3rcl0ck Aug 17 '22

There's probably a way to do it in stealth mode so the VM window doesn't steal the focus. If you haven't heard of autohotkey, look into it. It's crazy awesome, does some crazy stuff, and it's free! I could post for hours about how I use ahk all day long.

1

u/totallynotpurple900 Aug 17 '22

This a shot in the dark but the only way I can attempt to reach you, but does the discord server "Best Friends" and the name "Purple" mean anything to you. If so, can you dm me.