Birthdays is Back!

A lot of people are aware that there is an unofficial listing of deviantART birthdays, a lot of people are not aware. Recently, *birthdays had to shut down temporarily due to the lack of a managable database and a general lack of management, but *birthdays has been revived and is back better than it ever has been.

Introduction to Birthdays

*birthdays is an account originally created in 2002 by `mygrane. It's purpose was to gather the birth dates of deviants (with their permission, of course!) and send them a greeting via their userpage when their birthdays came around. All birthdays were originally stored and maintained in journals at *birthdays itself, until a website was eventually developed to store and display the birthdays.

In the years to follow, there would be many other people to put in a helping hand with maintaining birthdays, with the likes of ~jade, `adam1975, `lobsterclaws, @kyza, ~witness, `zetab, `nyssi and `leaf-lover all playing their part.

The Faces of Birthdays

The birthdays website was created and maintained by ~witness for the longest time we can all remember. Since it's creation, it has had a few faces:



We'd like to extend our gratitude to ~witness, who has done an amazing job over the past few years. Your contribution and hard work has been greatly appreciated, not just by the people that have been involved with birthdays, but the every day deviants that loved getting their birthday greeting every single year. Thank you.

The New Face of Birthdays

Since the temporary "shut down" of *birthdays, there has been one person working ever so hard on creating a new website for us to keep track of the existing and new birthdays yet to be added. This also means the website has an entire new look, functionality and a few little goodies that we're sure deviants will love.

What's new on this new birthdays website?

• New design and layout


• Completely new backend


• New search functions - search for a user and it will highlight the name for you on the results page


• Highlight friends birthdays - "When looking at the birthdays front page, there are a lot of people who are celebrating birthdays. A new feature of the birthdays website is that you can get your friends names highlighted in bold on the birthdays page, so they’re a lot easier to find. Simply type in all the names your friends’ dA usernames."


• Journal birthday badge - "It’s now possible to get a badge in your journal, shoutboard or webcam on your deviantART profile that displays a countdown to your birthday."

The ability for users to add themselves has also been removed completely due to abuse in the past. For privacy purposes, we don't allow friends to add friends (we prefer it straight from user, we must have their strict permission to add their birth date details to the website), so this has now been carried over to the website itself, so people can no longer add anyone they think they should add. All requests to be added must be made via note to *birthdays.

The new birthdays site will also been undergoing a major clean up over the next couple of weeks. What this means is that all dead and banned accounts, stock accounts, miss spellings and group/club accounts will be removed. If you are existing in the database and would like to be removed, please don't hesitate to send a note with the subject "Remove" to *birthdays. One of the members on the team will have your birthday removed within 48 hours maximum.

Meet the Team

With the launch of the new website comes a couple of new deviants that make up the fab-four that run and maintain birthdays.

• `zetab has been involved with *birthdays since mid-2005 and continues to put in her time and effort into making sure the entire project doesn't die


• `nyssi has also been involved alongside `zetab since mid-2005


• `electricnet is the brain behind the new website. He has put in a lot of effort and smarts into its development. We're more than happy to have this guy on the team to help us out wherever possible


• =diamond281 has kindly volunteered to help, and again, we're happy to have her on the team

What this means is that not just one or two people will have to cope with the strain of the amount of work that needs to go into *birthdays every single day, and have to miss out on some greetings, which has happened many times in the past. This should minimize disappointment from those waiting all year for their greeting.

So, head over to *birthdays to be added to the database, or head to the new website to see what it's all about.