I’ve been in online communities where celebrating birthdays is a big deal, automating it doesn’t really seem to do that. And if a community grows beyond some size, birthdays become too commonplace to be worth celebrating. I’m on one site where the daily birthday list can have dozens of names on it, I never look at it, I don’t know if others do, but I suspect not.
With anonymous guests, I’m not sure if having things that increase the sense of ‘community’ tend to lead the anonymous readers into joining the site. (If there’s a fee involved, that complicates matters.)
On my food site, we tend to talk about what we’re cooking and baking on a daily basis. That’s a holdover from the site that most of us came from that was discontinued by its sponsor, King Arthur Flour. I don’t know the reasons why they dropped support for their forums, maybe they thought all that chatting about what we’re cooking and baking wasn’t helping sales. But I can say that I used to order products from King Arthur’s catalog several times a year, since they dropped their forums in 2016 I’ve probably ordered from them maybe three times.