UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback Suggestion: Prevent duplicate birthday emails with sent flag

Users (including me) sometimes get 14–21 birthday notices. The root cause is likely no uniqueness check or sent flag—emails can re-trigger if cache rebuilds or queries return the same user multiple times.
Simple fix idea:
Add two columns to USER_PROFILE:
SQL

In the birthday email sending logic (wherever it mails users):
SQL

In the birthdays.php query, add condition:
SQL
Logic:

Sent=0, year ≠ current → send (new year)
Sent=1, year ≠ current → send (reset for new year)
Sent=0, year = current → send (first time this year)
Sent=1, year = current → skip (already sent)

This ensures one email per user per year. No duplicate sends, no lost emails.
Happy to test or provide diffs if helpful. Just a reliability tweak.

Multiple birthday emails fixed by adding this at the top of trigger_birthday_notifications() in libs/triggers.inc.php (right after globals):

Cause of multiples:
The forum index page calls the birthday function every time it loads. On a busy day many users (and bots) visit the index → the function runs many times → each run tries to send emails to everyone whose birthday is today.


Why the fix stops duplicates:
The added check looks at the CACHE 'birthdays' value before doing anything.
If it already matches today’s date, the function stops immediately.
The first run of the day sends one email to each user who has a birthday today and then sets the CACHE value. All later runs see the updated value and skip the whole process.
This way every qualifying user gets exactly one email, and no duplicates are sent.

Backup your files first. Test with page reloads.
Kept "Send birthday email" disabled until patched, because until it's patched, multiple emails will be sent.

This entire conversation should be superceded by Isaac's elegant fix: https://www.ubbcentral.com/forums/u...le-birthday-emails-being-sent#Post266939

Problem:
Birthday emails were being sent multiple times per day due to a type mismatch and the lack of an immediate early exit, allowing re-processing even with a lock.

The following is log evidence from the admin log on our server of multiple birthday email batch runs. Each entry shows the time the process ran, who ran it, the number of emails sent, and the display names of the recipients. This is only a partial view. Some users have reported receiving as many as forty birthday emails. If you examine the lists of display names, you will see people being sent emails on multiple days as well. SaluteProducts, GucciVSbag1, 69 k20, lanebradford, GMC XLI, John Self, Wildman38, NCars, 1954trucker, Brittain, stylemaster47, mac_the_yankee, Brian Moore, Ian Ferguson, MoonDawg, JohnG 53, 1bigpig!, Bart, BenTolson, slotmandave, slick59, Fleetwoodfloyd, Hookalatch, Bobinpa, CaptKen47, noodlenose, sepp, tirediron




Note: the developer fixed a separate problem by ensuring that the value for birthday in {$config['TABLE_PREFIX']}CACHE was not erased when the cache was cleared. This was a necessary fix but did not completely resolve the issue

Solution:

• Added early string exit if $sent === $today (lines 108-110) — prevents a re-run on same day.
• Simplified lock claim query (lines 113-119) — removed redundant AND CACHE_VALUE = ? clause (original had unnecessary extra check; affected_rows suffices).
• Added $sent_count tracking + optional debug log (lines 144, 153-154, 166-167) — counts emails and logs batch size.

Code Changes:

Early exit (added after globals - lines 104 & 105):

PHP
Simplified lock claim (replaced original lines 115-120):

PHPSent count + log (added in loop and after - added after line 165 - at the end of the function):

PHPThis last one adds a line to the admin log that looks like this:
2026-01-02 18:00:37 UBB.threads (IP address) BIRTHDAY_BATCH Sent 27 birthday emails

Birthday emails should only be sent by UBB threads, not by user actions, and, if you incorporate this line, you should see one entry per day.