You say it’s your birthday?
The discussion revolves around a potential plugin idea for Discourse. codinghorror proposes a feature to display a cake emoji next to a user’s name on their birthday, with two possible dates: the day they joined Discourse (default) or their actual birthday (entered in a custom birthday field in user profile).
Some concerns were raised about the default date not working well for sites based on imported data cpradio and fantasticfears discuss this point.
tgxworld started working on the plugin, which currently uses the default date of the day the user joined Discourse. However, tgxworld plans to add an option to update the user’s date of birth under user preferences.
sam suggests adding a date custom field type, and sam proposes building a UI for it in user preferences. However, tgxworld thinks it’s better to drop it from core and keep it as a plugin feature.
The plugin is expected to provide two features: Cakeday (the date you joined Discourse) and Birthday (your actual birthday) tgxworld. Before releasing it officially, tgxworld wants to improve how birthdays are entered.
One feature that might be fun as a plugin (can’t see this as core) – when it is your birthday, show a cake Emoji next to your name.
Reddit does something like this “cakeday” and it’s fun. But we could use two possible dates:
the day you joined that Discourse (default)
your actual birthday, as entered in a custom birthday field in user profile, since we don’t – and have no plans to – have this field by default
Anyway I think this is a fun feature and would make an excellent plugin.
How could a plugin grab this info? This would be so neat 
The created_at column of the user will contain their join date.
Definitely seems like a cool idea.
Just remember that wont work well for sites based on imported data.
Unless the imported data include the join date.
Our forum anyway, the join date for the imported accounts is the day they were imported.
I imagine it could be worked out how to do it, but I’m not so sure this would be considered enough of a priority to do the work involved while there are still so many other things that need to be done first.
Though if a “date == after ____”, or better, an “except where date == ____” thing was in place it would help.
You would need to import and then go back and change created_at. Or change created_at as part of the import. This might be considered poor practice, but I’ve done it myself importing legacy data into a new CMS.
An option to include both types of cake day would be nice - “real” and “join date”.
Some forums have “legendary” topics that could possibly be celebrated as well… 
What’s a “legendary” topic?
It could be a topic about an ongoing project that has not exactly gone as expected and exactly for that reason has been active since it’s inception and has become a forum in-joke or something like that.
I would love to have this! It would be hard to do join date for us too, so the birthday would be a great starting point.
If anyone can point me to where the rendering occurs, I’d love to attempt this.
That’s funny because, the day i joined my favourite forum, http://forum.minecraftpvp.com , was also my birthday c:
This would be lovely to see implemented!
Well, there’s a date_of_birth column in the users table. 
It’s just not possible to set / change it in the user profile at the moment.
The SMF2 importer is already setting this field during the import and I’m going to add it to the phpBB3 importer.
That would be cool in a section with the forum statistics 
@codinghorror Do we want to allow users to set this? This would help with the development of the plugin.
I think the plugin should first work with the date someone joined the Discourse and have a config option to use the birthdate field, later.