Birthdays FAQ

birthdays was created with a sole purpose: To bring deviants birthday greetings when their special day rolls around. Each and every day, we look at the deviantART Birthdays Website and visit each deviants birthdays for that particular day, giving them a little love and well wishes on their birthday.

Yes, this is quite possible and we do encourage this as a lot of people request to be added and they are already. On the deviantART Birthdays Website there is a search function in the top right-hand corner. Enter your name here and press enter.

Anyone can check to see if a certain deviant's birthday is listed. All you need to do is use the search function which you will find in the top right hand corner of the deviantART Birthdays Website. Enter the username and hit enter. If they are listed it will show you the date!

We will not add anyone unless they ask us personally. The reasons for this are privacy. Not everyone wants their birthday known to the entire world (everyone has visible access to the birthdays database). In the past, we have also been flamed from people in cases where friends have added them without permission.

Quite simple. If you come to birthdays and tell us you haven't received a greeting, it's because you aren't listed. If you're not listed, we will not wish you a happy birthday. We don't know every single member's birthdays so it is impossible for us to give you one if you haven't been listed.

If you know you are infact listed and still didn't receive a birthday greeting, it could be one of a few reasons:

(1) Your birthday has been added incorrectly.
(2) Your username is spelt incorrectly.
(3) You haven't been active on deviantART in quite some time (a couple of months+) and we haven't left you a message because of this.
(4) Your profile page asks that visitors don't leave comments on it.  

Before the switch over to our new database, it was possible for users to add themselves to the database. That also meant that users were able to enter in friend's usernames as well. Although we asked people not to do this, some indeed did. This would be the reason why you're listed. However, now we have a new database in place, it is no longer possible for users to add themselves which protects unauthorized adding of friends.

Since we now have the ability to remove people from the database, we have been putting this into good use. If you were listed on the database, but noticed that you no longer are, this could be due to several of the following reasons:

• (1) You have been removed due to inactivity. The removal process is usually decided in a few ways. For example, if you have been logged out of deviantART for more than 6 months you will be removed. If we cannot judge by that since some people hide their online status, other things will be taken into account such as if you have a recent birthday greeting on your page from the last year. If this is the case, but you have logged in let's say 5 days ago, you will still be removed. We cannot waste our time wishing people happy birthday that are hardly active and we do not feel comfortable with overloading people's pages with greetings. 
• (2) You've changed your username without notifying us.  To notify us of a username change, please send us a note with the subject "Username Change" and include your old username, new username, and date of birth