UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development Modification Ideas Birthday Cron

Has anyone created a birthday cron for 7.0? I am talking about the Mod that was done for 6.2 sent an email as well as posted message in a forum that said Happy Birthday.

It hasn't been done yet, tho it sounds like a good idea. I'd think since we're already displaying birthdays for the day it wouldn't be too difficult to expand on it. I'd like to see that in the base code

I had made the suggestion or asked about it prior to 7.0 release but nothing ever came of that nor did there seem to be a lot of interest. I wonder if people would be interested now?

I wait for it

This is something I'm looking at getting into 7.2. The big roadblock currently is trying to figure out a trigger. We abandoned actual cron jobs for version 7 since many people don't have the option to run them on their server. So, I need to figure out something to trigger it and make sure it only gets run once per day.

I have a few ideas in mind, but trying to come up with something with the least amount of impact on overall speed, since we don't want to have to check if they've been sent that day on every page load.

I'd love to have this in threads; I have many sites I frequent (over many types of forum software solutions) that send out mailings for my birthday; and it always gets me to come back, at least for little bit ...

I rec'd a couple last week from sites I don't even remember signing up for

What about the check being hooked to calendar views? It's already checking and showing birthdays. It would depend on someone viewing the calendar daily, but I guess se bots would be doing that for us for the most part

Actually spent some time last night figuring this out. We always query the CACHE table every time the cfrm page is loaded. We do this to find out if the max_online count is ever exceeded. I'll just add a new entry into this table that we can grab at the same time. This will just be a timestamp that birthday notices were sent out. So we can check and see if they need to be sent again. No extra query involved.

Cool I am glad this is getting attention

Sounds great! I've been a member of hundreds of forums, and after some things come up I forget about that site and it gets pushed to the side burner and I rarely visit it again; but some have that birthday reminder that just makes me want to wander over once I remember i was subscribed...

5-23-2007: 7.2 Feature: Added a control panel option to send out Happy Birthday emails on each user's birthday.