Help
How Daycrane works
What Daycrane is
Daycrane keeps the dates that come round every year — birthdays, anniversaries, name days — in one place, and makes sure you hear about them before they arrive. Every Friday morning it sends a single short email covering the week ahead and the two after it, and in a week with nothing in it, nothing at all. The same dates are available as a calendar feed your phone or laptop can subscribe to, so they sit alongside everything else you already keep. A date needs a month and a day; the year is optional, and without one no age is ever mentioned. Lists can be shared, so a household or a team keeps one set of dates rather than a copy each.
Dates
Why is the year optional?
Because you often don’t know it, and a date without a year is still a date worth keeping. Leave it blank and we simply never mention an age. Fill it in and the digest says “turns 41”, and the ones ending in a zero get flagged further ahead.
What about 29 February?
It is observed on 28 February in years that don’t have one. That is a choice rather than a rule of nature — the alternative is 1 March, which moves the date into the wrong month, or skipping the year entirely, which is how somebody misses a birthday three years in four.
Why can I still see dates that have already passed?
The current month is shown whole, with the days gone by dimmed at the top. Without that, a 3 August birthday looked at on the 26th would appear nowhere at all — passed this year, and next August is outside the window. It also answers “did I miss it?”, which people genuinely ask.
The weekly email
When does it arrive?
Friday morning at nine, in your own time zone, unless you change the day and hour in settings. It covers the current week and the two after it.
Why didn’t I get one?
If nothing is coming up, we don’t write at all — an email that says “nothing this week” is a week of training you to ignore us. Settings shows the last few emails we sent, and says plainly if we could not reach your address.
How do I stop it?
Every email has an unsubscribe link that works without signing in, and the same link can turn off just the day-of reminders and leave the weekly digest alone. The same switches are in settings.
Lists and sharing
What happens when I share a list?
Everyone in it sees the same dates and can add, edit and remove them. There is no owner: members are equal, which is the only arrangement that does not eventually strand somebody. Sharing and leaving are both done from your lists.
What happens when I leave one?
The list stays with the people still in it, along with the dates in it — they are shared, and mostly about other people. A list you are the last member of goes when you do.
Can I delete a shared list?
Only if you are the last member. One person should not be able to destroy something four others are using; remove the others first if you really mean to, and that friction is deliberate.
Your calendar
How do I subscribe?
Your feed address is in settings. Paste it into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook as a subscribed calendar, and your dates appear there and stay updated. There is no app to install.
Someone else has my feed address. What now?
Rotate it, in settings. That gives the feed a new address and stops the old one immediately — you will need to re-subscribe on your own devices. Revoking stops it without a replacement.
Why does the calendar not show ages?
Because a calendar entry repeats every year and an age does not. “Anna turns 41” would be right once and wrong for the next decade. The birth year is in the event’s description instead.
Getting data in and out
Can I import a file?
Yes — the import screen takes a CSV with a name column and a date column, and works out the rest. Nothing is written until you have looked at what we found: dates that match something already on your list arrive unticked, so you never get two of anybody by accident.
Can I get everything back out?
Whenever you like, as a CSV, from settings. It reads straight back into the import, so it doubles as a backup you can restore.
How do I delete everything?
At the bottom of settings, the deletion screen. It says exactly which lists go and which stay with other people before anything happens, and it offers you the export first.
Anything else
Write to support@daycrane.com. See also privacy for what we hold, and terms for the arrangement.