Member birthday icons

[wide_worlds_joy]

Title:
Member birthday icons

Area:
Member icons

Summary:
Icon for Birthday members and notification of important dates

Description:
How about a script that will pull birthdays off the database and append that to the weekly email? Perhaps (if you are going to install virtual gifts like LJ has), do a thing where it gives you a little heart or cake next to their user ID on their birthday? And then you just say "Happy Birthday" just before the append.

And then do something similar for any other dates that are important, like anniversaries and so on...

I mention this because a friend on my flist had posted about a birth in his family.

<user name="denise"> responded with this:

That sounds like a really neat idea, actually! This post is more designed for people with DW-related news and announcements to let me know about them so I can include them in the weekly [site community profile] dw_news updates (which I totally need to write for this week and I am so late with it, auuugh, but it has been Fight With Tax Forms Week and I am going crazy), but I would totally love it if you could suggest this through our official suggestions process, because I think that could be a really awesome feature.

We do have "build a calendaring system" (so like what you mean with the anniversaries and the like, the system would notify you about things you told it to notify you about when that date rolls around) as one of our suggested projects for our Google Summer of Code application, so it is something we've been tossing around, but I don't think there's ever been a formal suggestion about it, and I'd love to see what would come up in the discussion as things people would want it to do.

Poll #2465 Member birthday icons

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 42

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (14.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
3 (7.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
23 (54.8%)

(I have no opinion)
9 (21.4%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.4%)

Comments

[zarhooie]

I do not like the idea of changing the userhead; I think it will be confusing and possibly inaccessible.

[markmanching]

me too i'm totally that

[wide_worlds_joy]

I meant, not changing the user icon at the beginning of the userhead, but ADDING a birthday cake at the end, outside the parenthetical user ID, simply denoting that they are having a birthday, or an anniversary or something similar.

[denise]

Do you use Ravelry? On the forums there, certain words have icons added after them. Like, if you type "cake", it comes up as cake instead.

[wide_worlds_joy]

Lots of forums are like that these days. GaiaOnline is like that.

[jumpuphigh]

I wouldn't want my birthday announced to everyone on DW in a newsletter. I nearly had a conniption when they tried to institute that for "employee morale" at work and that would have only been to about 50 people.

However, some tracking of my Circle's birthdays/special events would be great. No actual ideas here atm but I'll sleep on it.

[wide_worlds_joy]

Then possibly an opt-in or opt-out function?

[jumpuphigh]

It should definitely be opt-in not opt-out. Doing something to users just because they didn't know to opt-out doesn't really fit with how I see the DW community working.

[kyrielle]

+1. Even if I choose to display my birthday, I may not want it emailed out or even iconed on the site.

Beyond that, I don't really care for the idea the other way, either - I'm interested in my friends' birthdays, but not in all the birthdays on the site or even all the birthdays of people who may post in communities I watch or comment on things. I don't really like extra icons at the best of times (I like words a lot better than images, which I have to train myself to recognize and deal with), let alone when it will often be conveying information that I may not be interested in.

[havocthecat]

This.

[noracharles]

I don't care, as long as I can choose not to have any icons appended after my name, and never have to see any appended icons in my style or in any site scheme.

[sorchasilver]

+1

[piscinarii]

I really have no opinion either way, but if something like this were implemented I'd like to see it as an opt-in feature probably somewhere on the profile page... where you choose to show your birthdate/parts of your birthdate there could be this option to show an icon on your b-day.

[nacbrie]

I think this would be quite nice if implemented as a V-gift (if V-gifts are being introduced). Say it was Jane's birthday, I could buy her a normal birthday cake V-gift (which shows up on her profile), or I could give her a cake-picture-after-user-name-V-gift (nacbrie ). That way, if the giftee doesn't want it they can refuse it (like how V-gift options were being discussed previously), and you're not going into the options UI issue.