Email on Birthday

[conan]

I think would be really cool if we could make a custom message to be sent to members on their birthdays.

The message could include his or her board info, as well as remind them of their membership.

I for one would really like to see something like that!

[TechTalk]

I agree 100% conan. This software has all the bread and butter but has no way of reminding your users to come back other than an e-mail sent thru the board.

I would imagine something like this would require a cron job to run though so jelsoft might not do it.

I for one think they should release "modules" that simply "plugin" to vb and if you cant use them then you cant use them :) Similar to what phpshop does

~Chris

[Freddie Bingham]

I posted the cron job for this before and it has been running on my forums for months now.

[Mas*Mind]

You don't necessery need a cronjob. If you're forum gets visited at least one time a day you can do it in another way:

Make a hidden template with the a timestamp in it

If a user visits the forum this timestamp is requested and is checked if it's a timestamp before today..If that's the case mail all today's birthdays and update the timestamp, if not: Do nothing..

In this way only one user get's the extra query's (and script-load)

It's not 100% secure, because if a forum isn't visited a day then no-one get's emailed, but most forums are visited at least one time a day. It's a solution that can be built into vb without the need for a cronjob

[conan]

Mas*Mind

How exactly would that work?

freddie
I searched for that thread, but I couldn't find it.
Do you remember the thread partial title or something?

[conan]

I believe I found the thread:
http://vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=9175&highlight=email+birthday

[Freddie Bingham]

Yes MasMind that could be done and is sort of how the update of the birthdays that are shown on the front page is handled (they are not dynamic).

[TechTalk]

Great hack freddie thanks.

Ive got it all up and running and looks good!

Now we just need the option to edit the message from the cp. 2.1 possibly? doing it the way masmind described?

:)