the reputation weightage doesn't seem to work for negative rep. I've set the weightage to 10% of rep power. But when members give a negative rating, it reduces by 1 reputation point regardless of the power of the member giving the negative rating.

can you pls check that?

Ok boys & girls. Here's the moment many of you have been waiting for / begging for / hitting me over the head about... collapsed negative posts just like in the vB4 version!

To update just upload the new XML file and check your settings. You'll see all the needed options to hide negative posts.

Thanks to Simon Lloyd for the vb3 test site! Since I only have his test site I'm considering this beta.

More updates to come soon so let me know any issues or suggestions!

seems awesome, tks Ted!

but think you can share alittle more on this new feature? i checked out the vb4 version and don't find any too.

if the post is collapsed, can users still see it if they want to? what if its the first post of the thread?

tks!

Nice work Ted, even if you uncollapse the post it still appears collapsed when you revisit the thread. Not for me Ted as i don't mind people seeing negative posts (a balance is always good) but how much work would it be to have an admin option to make the post hidden to usergroups {.....,x ,xx, xxx......etc), perhaps an admin option, this way you could have the post hidden if it really isn't needed for your forum from your membership but could still have it indexed by search engines. Maybe, and i know this is probably a huge amount of work, you could have an admin only /hiddenhelpfulanswers.php where there would be a table of posts that admin could visit to change the status or perform admin.

I'll explain more now and get some screenshots up later.

Basically you can set a threshold for votes and any post with a score under that is automatically collapsed. Users can still expand it if they wish to view it, it just doesn't show up until they do.

So for example, you could say that posts with -100 are hidden or posts with -1. You decide.

Unfortunately there's no way to use the default collapse system, hide the post by default and respect the cookie system. It's either expanded by default (like the forum home) or always collapsed on load.

What you're explaining is actually pretty simple to implement. Search engines can still see the posts as it's just javascript that hides them but google is pretty bright and the display:none; attribute may upset it, so it's definitely a good idea.

Would you see this being a user option or just an admin setting?

I would have thought that it should be an admin option as then you have complete control over how your board looks, but in the spirit of forums being free and the information on them maybe it should be a user option or maybe a combination....e.g

AdminCp>Usergroups:
Usergroups that can see unhelpful answers:
does not overide above, adds selection to UserCp
Usergroups that can hide/unhide unhelpful answers:

UserCP:
Always display unhelpful posts: Yes No

So, if we are giving control to the user maybe we wouldn't have to use JS (although its a pretty neat way of doing it), perhaps we could use a template conditional for the usergroup that refers to the AdminCp & UserCp setting, like i have said previously im no coder and i'm probably looking at it too simplistic!

As an added Ted, maybe, if you want to use JS then couldn't you build the conditional or whatever to actually display the post or not use display:none for google using the useragent string to recognise it?

Or am i talking complete rubbish? :)

Yes you can but google doesn't have to use the user agent string at all times. I'll add this in as an option.

tks for the explanation, sure helps!

any answer regarding the negative rep and weightage issue i posted above? tks.