On This Day v1.0.3

Sidebar widget surfacing milestones from this calendar day in past years — best threads, member-iversaries, reply count crossings, site anniversary, and more.

FREE FOR CUSTOMERS

Blatchy On This Day

A milestone-driven sidebar widget for XenForo 2.3 that surfaces what actually happened on this calendar day in your forum's past. Not a random old post — only moments worth resurfacing: the best thread from each year, members who joined today, threads that crossed reply milestones, and your site's anniversary.

Features

• Eight milestone detectors — best thread of the year, long-running threads still active, reply count milestones (100/500/1K/5K/10K), first thread in a forum, most-reacted post, member-iversaries, first post by a still-active member, and site anniversary
• Smart deduplication — the same thread won't appear twice with different milestone labels; highest-significance type wins
• Permission-aware — milestones referencing threads or posts the viewer can't see are silently dropped
• Forum scope filter — show milestones from all forums, or pick a specific subset
• Minimum reply threshold — filters out abandoned threads from "best of the year" milestones
• Daily cron rebuild — milestones are computed once per board-day; widget reads from a tiny cache table on every pageview
• Proper pluralization — "1 year ago" / "5 years ago" / "1 reply" / "1,023 replies"
• Hide on dry days — option to hide the widget entirely on calendar days with no qualifying milestones
• Theme-friendly — uses your style's text and accent colors automatically; works with light and dark modes

Milestone types

• Best thread of the year — top thread (by replies) started on this day, one per past year
• Long-running threads — threads started on this day that are still receiving replies (last 30 days)
• Reply count milestones — threads that crossed 100, 500, 1K, 5K, or 10K replies on this day
• First thread in a forum — anniversary of the very first thread ever posted in each forum
• Most-reacted post — top post by reaction score on this day, one per past year
• Member-iversaries — top three most-active members who registered on this day in past years
• First post by an active member — anniversary of a still-active member's first-ever post
• Site anniversary — fires on the calendar day of the very first thread ever posted

Installation

1. Upload the contents of the upload folder to your XenForo root directory
2. Admin CP → Add-ons → Install On This Day
3. Admin CP → Tools → Cron entries → find Rebuild On This Day milestones → click Run now (this populates today's milestones immediately; afterward it runs daily)
4. Appearance → Widgets → Add widget → choose On this day (Blatchy)
5. Pick a position (sidebar recommended), toggle which milestone types to enable, save

Configuration

• Maximum items shown — defaults to 6, range 1 to 20
• Milestone types — toggle each of the eight types independently
• Minimum replies for thread milestones — defaults to 10
• Forum scope — all viewable forums, or a hand-picked selection
• Hide on empty days — don't render the widget when no milestones qualify

How it works

A cron job runs hourly and detects when the board has crossed midnight. On the first run of each board-day, it scans past years for qualifying milestones and stores results in a dedicated cache table. The widget then reads from this table on every pageview — a single indexed query returning at most a few dozen rows. Subsequent runs the same board-day are no-ops, so there's no repeated work.

Compatibility

• XenForo 2.3+
• No other add-ons required

Support

Visit overallowed.com for support and to see the rest of the Blatchy / Over Allowed addon catalog.