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 \\=^))

[Logician]

Getting a lot of notifications happens if you applied STEP2 wrongly and entered a wrong date or in a wrong format. So the hack wouldn't know your real installation date and in the first run will greet birthdays starting from your wrongly entered date until today (thus will produce a lot of greetings.)

It will stop "today"'s date is reached so it is safe to assume that the date in the database is correct now. Thus you shouldn't have any problems from now on. It will go on greeting normally from now on as date is now ok. But if you want to make sure, run this query and confirm date is today or yesterday:
[sql]
SELECT leftdate from timetick where action='birthday';
[/sql]

If you want to remove the hack, you can simply delete the hack code you inserted in index.php. This will uninstall (and stop) the hack.

[interfx]

I installed this, and appears I did everyhting correct... I set it to option 3 (ADMIN)...

How do I know if it is working??? What do I have to do?

Thanks for your help... (I'm sure it is obvious)
InterFX

[Logician]

if you turned on DEBUG option (ie 3), set admin notification ON and enter your email so that you can get greeting report from the hack. (Also make sure you have a few birthdays in the following days). If you get birtdays report ok and hack seems that it is greeting birthdays (actually it does not, as debug mode is on!), you can turn off debug mode.

[interfx]

Still never got anyhting (email)

Here's my main settings
$greeting_type=3;
$admin_report=2;
I also entered my correct email...

Also adjusted the load to
$estimated_load=10;

I added the right SQL stuff, and added directly into the index.php inside of Vbulletin... Any other things I should look for to amke this work??? I'm afraid to turn on live, if the debug is not working correctly...

Thanks for any suggestions out there...

INterFX

[Logician]

Today at 01:03 AM interfx said this in Post #154
Still never got anyhting (email)

Here's my main settings
$greeting_type=3;
$admin_report=2;
I also entered my correct email...

Also adjusted the load to
$estimated_load=10;

I added the right SQL stuff, and added directly into the index.php inside of Vbulletin... Any other things I should look for to amke this work??? I'm afraid to turn on live, if the debug is not working correctly...

Thanks for any suggestions out there...

INterFX

Run this query and confirm date is today or yesterday:

[sql]
SELECT leftdate from timetick where action='birthday';
[/sql]

If date is today or yesterday it means that hack is working ok.

So why don't you get admin report emails? This is most probably because there some problems about templates. Here is a check list:
* Check all templates are created successfully
* Check template names are correct (CASE - SENSITIVE!!)
* Check there are no trailing space or something in template names
* If you have more than 1 template sets, make sure you created hack templates in your ALL sets.

[interfx]

I tried a few things, and it now seems to be working fine...

I had to lower the estimated load time from 30 to 10 to finally 5... At 5 it finally worked... I'm not sure what this really means - but others out there - go ahead and lower it right away to see if it makes it work correctly...

Thanks for all of the help -
InterFX

[Logician]

if hack didnt work for 3 days altough your estimated load was 10, it means that you have less than 10 visitors a day in your forum home page or testing the script in localhost or testboard so never got visitors in the homepage to initiate the hack.

[dano]

Cant wait to try it out. *Clicks Install*

[dano]

Strange, I installed this and for some reason I can not post polls anymore on the site. I have not installed any other hacks or anything and the polls worked fine before. The hack works great, but I need my polls back, any ideas?

[dano]

^