Automatic Birthday Thread

This hack is inspired by the Birthday Hack for vB2 by Logician. It will automatically create a Happy Birthday thread in a specified forum, listing the people with birthdays for that day. Then other members can post their happy birthday wishes in the thread.

I had the original hack installed on my VB2 board and when I upgraded to VB3 my members missed it. Luckily, it's really easy to implement.

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Files to modify: /includes/cron/birthday.php
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Instructions are in the attached text file. The mod should take about 5 minutes.

Be sure to change the variables that say // CHANGE ME

You can customize the message in the $birthday_greeting_thread variable. You could also ad IMG tags with an image of some kind, like in my screenshot.

Note that you MUST turn on BB CODE in you birthday forum in order for this to work properly.
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Enjoy (and thanks for the inspiration, Logician!)
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New in Version 2.0:

Bug fixes:
> More accurate age calculation. Sometimes it was a year off.
> The correct thread shows up in the last thread post on the forum home page.
> HTML is not required to be turned on in the birthday forum.
> Most of the code is completely rewritten to vB3 standards.

New features:
> Improved look
> Birthday line now says: (User) was born on (date), (AGE: xx)
> If the year is not given, it says "Not telling! " for age.
> The admin is emailed a list of the birthdays with links to their profiles and a link to the happy birthday thread.
> If you use the uShop/uCash hack, you can give birthday points to the users

Upgrading:

Since the code has changed so drastically, I suggest starting with a fresh copy of birthday.php and following the instructions for a new install.

[Gary King]

Nice hack. Smilies should be disabled in the post though, because things like 8) become an emoticon (like (age: 18))

At least on my forums because I set it to that

[xtreme-mobile]

ive just edited the file like it says, now what do i do?

how do i tell it what forum to create the post into ?

[Michael2]

Originally Posted by xtreme-mobile

ive just edited the file like it says, now what do i do?

how do i tell it what forum to create the post into ?

$greetings_forum=xx; // CHANGE ME: Birthday forum ID

[Michael2]

Originally Posted by ChurchMedia

No, it's not about active users.....

It will only send out the email (and create the thread, name of person, etc.) for people who have agreed to accept emails from the admin. So unless you take that part of the code out, you'll never know how many people you'll get -- if any. It depends on each user's settings. Make sense?

That took care of it, thanks!

[xtreme-mobile]

cheers mate

[twinsmom]

I don't necessarily want anything more than Happy Birthday to Username--no ages, no dates or birth etc.

How would I do that?

[cdoyle]

Originally Posted by Lionel

I have a small problem. The email, the thread states the correct date but in the posts it shows as

Here are today's birthdays:

was born on November 30 (Age: Not telling! )

missing the username, the age. Sometimes the age states 30 when it should have been 40

I'm getting this too, what did you have to do to make it work? I tried modifying the birthday file, 3 time and each time I get the same thing?

I'm pretty sure I followed the directions and did everything it said to do.

Thanks
Chris.

[cdoyle]

Something else I noticed is, that it says that each person was born on November 30th?

Happy Birthday to , on May 10, 2005
was born on November 30 (Age: Not telling! )

Anyone have any ideas?

[cdoyle]

Anyone have an idea what I need to fix?

[lionslair]

I installed it tested it and it worked. I would really like to see the usergroup option employed in this though.