Ability to switch members' skins

[waywardmars]

On V4, our forum had a couple of restricted skins that were given as "gifts" - in particular a birthday skin that we'd switch people to on their birthday that wasn't available the rest of the year. It was a little forum tradition that our members loved, and we would like to be able to bring it back.

Thank you for considering our request!

[Ryan Roos]

Themes have permissions. It's as simple as setting a theme to only be available to certain groups.

For example. Make a birthday theme. Then make a birthday group. Set the theme to only work for people in the birthday group. Add people to the group on their birthday. You can even make the group hidden so people don't even know they're in it (or not, it's entirely up to you).

Long story short, you can already do what you're requesting. And you can get way more creative with how you do it.

[waywardmars]

Thanks for that suggestion, and that's a great feature, but after tinkering it still seems that won't quite do what we want it to - we can set it so the birthday skin is available to the birthday member group, but we want it to automatically switch over. Otherwise the members still have to realize that it's there. Maybe as an alternative, there could be a way to set the default skin by member group. That way the default skin for birthdays would be the birthday skin, but something else for other groups.

[Ryan Roos]

The only way an admin can forcefully change another persons theme is by turning it off or deleting it. The system will automatically set a person to the forum default (which can't be deleted or turned off). But this is still just a solution to deal with the issue of a theme being deleted or turned off. And if a theme was to be turned back on and the person never updated their preference they would be right back onto whatever theme had been turned off, like nothing ever happened.

Our overarching rule regarding the theme that you view is that it is a setting that is set by the member. It is not something staff have the permission to run around changing. So I understand where your dilemma falls. You want to forcefully change a member's theme, but unless you are quite literally switching the default (seasonally for example) you can't touch their preference.

For your birthday theme I have two solutions to achieve a similar goal. First, do the groups like I said. Then PM the member a happy birthday message along with a note that they can now enable the birthday theme. This is sort of anti-climactic so I understand why this might not be the route you want to take. Second, and more likely, develop a birthday plugin. Either yourself, or get some help, make a plugin that modifies any theme in a number of ways that are birthdayish. Obviously this is up to you with how far you take it. but there's no reason you can't make a plugin that essentially overwrites many of the pieces of a theme. If the plugin was made correctly you could even have a column of check boxes for different birthday effects, that way other forums could use it with variation. Then you would have a user search autoform that you could simply go and add members to a list that would enable their birthday features. Code it to remove people after a week. Or do it manually yourself. Maybe you could even have it check their birthday (if the variable is available) and it could do all of this automatically. How neat would that be?

That's just my crazy idea, there are probably a dozen other ways to get close to what you want to do. But we aren't going to change that from being a private setting.