Automatic Greeting Email/PM/Threads for Member Birthdays

This hack will automatically greet the birthdays of your board members by sending them:

• Private Messages
• Emails
• Both
• or by creating a birthday celebration thread in a specific forum.

Features:
* Does NOT require cron jobs so everybody can use it regardless of their server settings/rights.
* You can send PMs, emails (or both) or you can choose to send them PM if they can receive PM or else send email.
* The Hack can create special greeting threads for birthdays. (optional)
* Some usergroups (like banned users) can be excluded from automatic greetings.
* Admin can choose to receive a daily report via Email or PM about the greeted birthdays. (optional)
* Compatible with ALL vbulletin versions I know.
* Carefully coded to not to increase your SQL load and its quite performance-friendly. (More info about performance issues)
* New Added Feature: To greet only members who have more than X messages or who have visited your board in the last X days, see here
* New Added Feature: You can change his style in the day user has his birthday. Check here)
* New Added Feature: You can play Happy Birthday Song to your members in their birthdays. Check here

The hack is beta tested by many users for a long time before the release and proven to be quite stable. (BTW. thx to all beta testers especially to Dark_Wizard, Boofo, DslTeam, C-Pr0mpt for returning feedback).

WARNING: I strongly suggest:
a) Be careful while installing this hack (especially in step 2). If you install it wrongly, your members may get a lot of irrelevant greetings.
b) To make sure you installed it correctly, turn on DEBUG mode AND administrator notifications in the options of the hack while you are installing it. So the hack will NOT send any notifications to members but only send daily reports to admin. Keep an eye on these reports for a few days and if you made sure you installed it correctly and it works ok, you can safely turn off debug mode.


Enjoy the hack and if you install the hack please click INSTALL, thank you..

Logician \\=^))

[Lionel]

I've got 5 birthdays today... the thread posted in the correct forum, but it shows only 2 birthdays :ermm:

[Logician]

Originally posted by Lionel
I've got 5 birthdays today... the thread posted in the correct forum, but it shows only 2 birthdays :ermm:

Make sure other 3's usergroup is not excluded in options part.

[Lionel]

yep, number 3 is the users awaiting confirmation and that was the case

[Logician]

glad you figured that out. You either disable it or if you want not to greet awaiting confirmation members leave it as it is.

[Lionel]

My boards are 100% community based and I am sure the members appreciate to be remembered.

I must tell you that I was so impressed by your hack that I went hunting for your other hacks and installed a couple more. Both the webtemplates and the way that you provide for "cut and paste" of any section of a thread into news were impressive.
It's also good to know who rated.

Nice work, keep it up!

[Logician]

Addition to the Hack:

This small modifications will play happy birthday song to your members when they visit your board in their birthdays.


Features:

• This addition is independent from the hack itself. So you can use one without another. That is, you can apply this modification even if you didnt applied the hack itself
• It will play any .wav or .mid sound file to your users in their birthdays when they visited your board's main page.

Installation:

1-Edit global.php

find:

PHP Code:

// figure out the chosen style settings
unset($codestyleid);
unset($style); // prevent some weird issues 


After that add:

PHP Code:

// Logician Play Happy Birthday Song in users' birthday hack
$today_birthday=substr($bbuserinfo[birthday],-5);
$today_of_user = vbdate("m-d",time());
if ($today_of_user==$today_birthday) {$birthdaysong='<EMBED SRC="mysound.wav" hidden="true" AUTOSTART="true" loop=1  PLAYCOUNT=1>';}
// Logician Play Happy Birthday Song in users' birthday hack 


2- Upload the midi or wav you want to play under your board directory and replace mysound.wav with its name in the code.

3- Admin CP/Modify Template, edit template: forumhome

Find:

PHP Code:

$headinclude 


Replace it AS:

PHP Code:

$headinclude
$birthdaysong 


Notes:

• The hack will play the song in the board's home page only. If you wanted to play in other pages too (user CP for example) add the $birthdaysong variable to any template you want
• If you want the song be played in any page of your board, remove the $birthdaysong variable form forumhome and put it into a more global template like header. (But it would be boring to browse the board with a sound file chasing you in every page you visited so be warned!)
• By default song will be played once only when the page is loaded. If you want to play more than once replace 1s in "loop=1 PLAYCOUNT=1" part.

Enjoy!
Logician

Ps. If you apply the add-on that changes user's style in their birthdays, please check its post and reapply the code. I catched a bug in the code and corrected it. Considering the fact that nobody hollered, it seems nobody uses it though

[amity]

now i can't figure out why it isn't posting the thread on the forum.

if i put 1 for the forum number, does that mean the first forum i created? or the first forum listed on the main page? and does the numbering include the category as a forum?

thanks and blessings,
amity

[Logician]

Originally posted by amity
now i can't figure out why it isn't posting the thread on the forum.

if i put 1 for the forum number, does that mean the first forum i created? or the first forum listed on the main page? and does the numbering include the category as a forum?

if you put 1 for the forum number this means that you want it to post in the forum with forum id 1. That is:

http://www.yoursite.com/forum/forumd...p?s=&forumid=1

Do mail/pm/admin notifications run ok?

[David Bott]

For the last 3 days this hack has sent out more than one birthday greeting and I receive more than one PM of the ones that went out.

What I mean is..When I go into my PM the next day...I find 2 or three of the notcies of what went out. They all have the same time stamp and the same data in the message of who it went to.

When I contacted one of the birthday people on the list...they told me they received the message more than once.

NOTE...I am using it for E-MAIL only sending with it checking for their OK to send a message.

Please advise.

[Logician]

Originally posted by David Bott
For the last 3 days this hack has sent out more than one birthday greeting and I receive more than one PM of the ones that went out.

When I contacted one of the birthday people on the list...they told me they received the message more than once.

David increase the $estimated_load value.

The very high trafic of your board and very low estimated_load number (compared to your traffic) causes it. This is how it happens:

One visitor triggers the hack at midnight, the hack begins to compile birthday greetings but before it finishes and updates the database date, another visitor triggers it again (the first visitor's trigger didnt finished yet, so database date is still yesterday). Hack will be done in less than a second and your traffic is so high that, it gets triggered more than once in that very second and produce more than 1 greetings.

With so high traffic you really dont need so low estimated_load value. Increase it and you'll be fine.