For the future Calendar: Buddy Birthdays
(originally posted as a suggestion for vBulletin)
Another thing popped into my mind. What is one of the complete and utterly useless things in a board like vBulletin? Well... click on the Calendar and you know it.
By default on every single day you see Birthdays presented from your boardmembers. I mean...
come on, who wants to know?!
In my opinion such an overview of birthdays is pretty useless. As a regular boardmember I don't care if Miss. Marple has her birthday on July 29th if I check the Calendar on July 2th. At the most I am only interested in the birthdays of the people I have a bond with really. It is just like in real life...when you are sitting in the loo, staring at your birthday calendar in front of you, there are only entries on it from your family and dearest friends.
Sitting in the loo, staring at my laptop, and visiting my vBboard Calendar there are all these birthdays from
every single boardmember all over the place!
Okay, and now the solution.
Since this suggestions-thread is all about the vBulletin Profiles, you've guessed it : there need to be an
integration (vBulletin really really needs to
integrate more of it's modules/functions!) of the Calendar and the User Profile.
Look, as a boardadministrator I don't care at all which of boardmembers have their birthday on which date. Why not? Because vBulletin automatically sends out a birthday-email to my members (which is a great feature by the way!). But, seeing things through the eyes of a regular boardmember I think I would really want to know when my board
friends have their birthday. Just like in real life. So instead of putting the Calendar shockfull of birthday-entries I think the following will be much more effective:
There needs to be an area inside the User Profile where you -as a regular member- can see which of your Buddies have their Birthday. And I do not mean a mini-calendar. No just an
indication like this :
----
GirlyGirl has her birthday in 5 days on juli 31ste.
----
So 5 days before a buddy of yours has their birthday it shows up in your profile! And it keeps counting towards the Big Day. You see, this way you have kind of a birthday-
reminder really and it's much more usefull then the big default Calendar stuffed with all the birthdays of people you don't care about.
My site needs to become much more
personalized. Since vBulletin (what else?
(edit: well... a big chance in the future it's called xenForo ) powers my site : I need it to provide me with those much needed tools.
Your thougts please,
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Things like these are a reason why I need to see Friends back in xenForo. There is a lot of Friends functionality that my members like on Social Networking sites and I am not sure if I understand the concept of 'Followers' fully yet.