One other bit of feedback on an already excellent mod:

Within the "helpful answers system" menu in the admin control panel, it would be very helpful to be able to search/list the ratings based not only on who was rated and what they've rated, but also by who *has been rated* and what posts they've received ratings on. I'd think this would be straightforward to enable...

The reasons I'd like to see a Helpful Thread system based purely on the ratings of the posts are:

1) We already have Forum Ratings. It's a well known, well understood interface / concept. Replacing this with a Helpful Threads which is separate from Helpful Posts would seem to be reinventing the wheel.

2) It'd one less widget / knob / dial for the user to worry about. If they poke the helpful post button, they would automatically be giving the thread a rating bump. And as a user, this would seem totally natural ... if I found the post useful, then pretty much by definition I'm finding the thread useful (or not, as the case may be). I wouldn't really understand why I would have to go and manually give the thread a rating bump as a separate action.

3) Replacing the existing (and somewhat arbitrary 1 to 5 star) Thread Rating with a numeric Helpful Threads rating derived purely from the combined ratings of the posts in the thread would provide a true measure of how helpful any given thread is.

Perhaps there's a need for a Helpful Threads mod as a separate beastie instead of Helpful Posts ... but if I'm running Helpful Posts, I'd really like that option to replace the existing Thread Rating stuff with a derived value from the sum of the helpful posts. So instead of the rating stars on forumdisplay, I'd see a (sortable) numeric rating column.

-- hugh

Just a quick suggestion...

in the helpfulanswers.php page I removed 'Post 228819 in thread:' from the helpful_answers_top_bit template. My suggestion would be to grab the username to replace that text with. Something like:

Username in ThreadTitle

Users might enjoy seeing who is the most valuable poster.

The other suggestion I have is to enforce the Reputation rules. Right now a user may rate a post with the helpful anwers system and can also rate the same post with the standard Reputation controls in the postbit.

That's working as intended - because the rep system can have a different value ;)

You can customize the template to look like any of thoes combinations.

A helpful rating earns x credits set by user.

Thanks, but I was kind of hoping for the red and green colored ones.

I'd suggest working with a designer if you want custom icons. You can use any images you want with the system...

Great mod, should be introduced in vb4. Question: how can we have it like youtube?

See screenshot:

Thanks.

Very easy to change that you can do by editing the templates and adding an inactive (greyed out) icon.