Birthdays in the Newsfeed?

[blueshead]

I'm not sure it could be done because PB seems not to want it. Maybe done with a Super Key?

[Wormopolis]

The problem with this is twofold. in order to store this where everyone would have access, you would have to use a super forum key to store everyone's birthday. which also means the members would have to opt-in by manually agreeing to make their birthday public information. you also potentially COULD run out of room since forum keys are not infinite storage. you get 32K with a forum key, but you would need to store the birthday, user-id, and display name (which would have to also be updated if they changed it) per user in the key. small forums could probably get away with this, but you get a larger forum with thousands of members and that key would fill up quickly.

If you tried to get around that by using super user keys, you eliminate the storage problem, but you run into the new problem of that data only being accessible when that user happens to get parsed to the page by PB server. super user keys are not globally accessible everywhere, meaning if that user's name didnt appear on the page (by way of being in the users online or last post sections or moderator sections) then their key cannot be read. and trying to trick it by putting a hidden div with everyone's name in it doesnt work because those arent native user links but artificial ones. so if it was that user's birthday and they they werent in the links they wouldnt appear in the birthday section.

it was asked at one point to make it where you could put everyone's birthday in the plugin settings. well same thing as first scenario (although more room) you could potentially run out of space AND the added problem of the member not being able to opt-in on it themselves. which opens the door to privacy when a staff member tries to fill them all in regardless of member wishes and some member gets hostile over it.

it has been requested as a feature request a few times, but last I heard they werent to keen on making it happen. you can always check the support board for those threads and see the discussion, or try your luck at persuading the devs to make it part of proboards.data variable so it can be accessed by plugins without the worry of separate storage (and it could use the privacy flag the user has chosen in their profile to allow it in the variable or not). but its still going to be up to the devs whether it gets added or not.