Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Allow users to rate individual posts

Helpful Answers has been used to record over 6 MILLION times on more than 2,000 forums. If you're not using HA your users are looking for it!

Every day your users contribute hundreds if not thousands of posts making it hard for new members and guests to separate out the best answers from those that are less helpful. The Helpful Answers System offers your members a quick way to rate individual posts as either helpful or not allowing future visitors to understand the value of each post.

Designed to be flexible, HA has over 30 configurable settings:

• Use image or text ratings AJAX or traditional links.
• Offer yes/no or scaled 1-10 point ranking.
• Turn off negative ratings for a positive only system.
• Decide which forums are open for helpful answer ratings.
• Audit the system and identify top users and potential abusers.
• Ban specific members from using the system.
• Customize the message shown after a post is rated.
• Show a page with the top helpful posts.
• Show rating stats on a user's profile.
• Hide posts that rate "too low"
• Template driven so you can customize it all for your forum.

For advanced users template conditionals and variables let you further extend the functionality to color highlight good or bad posts, include ratings in user?s profiles and much more.

Modification Installation [Must Read]:

Step 1: Upload the addon files found in the upload/ folder to your forum directory
Step 2: Install the plugin through your vB Administration area
Step 3: Configure settings & enable the mod in individual forums

You must configure settings & enable forums before voting will show up.
Anonymous Stats Tracking (optional):

By default this addon will pass basic rating data (positive or negative) to a 3rd party site for statistical purposes. Only the most basic data is captured (the vote and your site name) and no user information or specific forum details are logged, not even an IP address. You can disable this through the admin.

Mod Philosophy -- Drive Your Own Success:

All of my mods are inspired by my work in digital marketing and are designed to drive registrations, interaction or other engagement activities the core platform does not address.

Each is designed to fit a general need by providing a starting point but it's on you to decide how to make things work to their best possible outcome. Feel free to suggest what you'd like to see next but don't wait to have what everyone else has; figure out what your forum needs and customize away.

[ThorstenA]

I found a minor issue: With the reputation system integrated, the helpful answers still display "do you find this post helpful" even if I have reputated the post before the installation of this product.

A big thank you for this product! It is great!

[ThorstenA]

Suggestion

To include a list of all users who reputated the thread without adding any query (!) you do this:

$hook_query_fields .= ",IF(reputationbit.reputationid,CONCAT('<br /><div>Users who liked this post</div>',GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT CONCAT('<a href=\"member.php?u=',reputationbit.whoadded,'\">',reputationbit.username,'</a><br /><span style=\"color:#333333\">',reputationbit.reason,'</span>') ORDER BY reputationbit.reason DESC SEPARATOR '<br />')),'') AS reputationbits"; 
$hook_query_joins .= "LEFT JOIN (SELECT reputationid, reputation.postid, reputation.whoadded,reputation.dateline, user.username, reputation.reason 
FROM reputation,user WHERE user.userid=reputation.whoadded) AS reputationbit ON reputationbit.postid = post.postid"; 
$postids .= " GROUP BY post.postid ";

Use this for your reputation table, too.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by ThorstenA

I found a minor issue: With the reputation system integrated, the helpful answers still display "do you find this post helpful" even if I have reputated the post before the installation of this product.

A big thank you for this product! It is great!

The two are not dependant, this is how it is suppose to work.

[ThorstenA]

Ah okay! What do you think about my suggestion? With that you could have a facebook view:

3 users like this: Ted S, Thorsten A, sticky

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by ThorstenA

Ah okay! What do you think about my suggestion? With that you could have a facebook view:

Very easy to do. Simply turn off negative ratings and change the text voting around a bit to read 'Like'. No code changes needed.

[sticky]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Nope.

I'd offer to help but you know this all way better than I ever well. I just hope this is not too difficult of a request to implement.

[SemperFideles]

Originally Posted by CvP

It can be admin defined.

1 show user names
2 show user names with votes
3 show user names for members; show user names with votes for moderators

for 1, have a box with small text size and comma list all user names.
for 2, place two box with small text size and comma list all user names accordingly.
for 3, combine 1 and 2 and simple template if condition.

I'd like to throw my vote in the hat for at least option 1 above.

Something below the signature that read something like:

The following 4 users found this post helpful: George, Sue, Pat, Rich

With linkable usernames.

One of the collateral benefits of a Thanking or Helpful Answers system is the useless "I agree with you completely" post. It allows for more focused answers rather than a Ditto. Furthermore, some of my users use the Post Thanks hack to let people know that they read their post about some event in their lives and are happy for them.

I want to Thank You for this very useful addon and don't want to seem ungrateful for the suggestion. I'll use it either way but I'd like to de-anonymize the helpful feature for many reasons (Admin selected). It would be great to be able to go into a profile of a member you trust and just search for the posts they find helpful.

[sticky]

Originally Posted by SemperFideles

I'd like to throw my vote in the hat for at least option 1 above.

Something below the signature that read something like:

The following 4 users found this post helpful: George, Sue, Pat, Rich

With linkable usernames.

One of the collateral benefits of a Thanking or Helpful Answers system is the useless "I agree with you completely" post. It allows for more focused answers rather than a Ditto. Furthermore, some of my users use the Post Thanks hack to let people know that they read their post about some event in their lives and are happy for them.

I want to Thank You for this very useful addon and don't want to seem ungrateful for the suggestion. I'll use it either way but I'd like to de-anonymize the helpful feature for many reasons (Admin selected). It would be great to be able to go into a profile of a member you trust and just search for the posts they find helpful.

Part of what I like is the anonymity as if users are shown they will no longer use the negative rating aspects of it. Anonymity even allows friends to keep friends in check with neg rep clicks.

My only issue is that certain users abuse this and will continually neg rep the same person.

[SemperFideles]

Originally Posted by sticky

Part of what I like is the anonymity as if users are shown they will no longer use the negative rating aspects of it. Anonymity even allows friends to keep friends in check with neg rep clicks.

My only issue is that certain users abuse this and will continually neg rep the same person.

Well, like I said, it would be nice to be Admin controlled. I like to know who found a post helpful. I'm not turning on the thumbs down thing as I want people to have to articulate their disagreement to a post whereas agreement or finding something helpful can be noted and pare down the size of a thread. I've had some posts with as many as 80 users Thanking it which dramatically cuts down on thread length if everyone Posted "Thank You."

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by SemperFideles

Well, like I said, it would be nice to be Admin controlled. I like to know who found a post helpful. I'm not turning on the thumbs down thing as I want people to have to articulate their disagreement to a post whereas agreement or finding something helpful can be noted and pare down the size of a thread. I've had some posts with as many as 80 users Thanking it which dramatically cuts down on thread length if everyone Posted "Thank You."

Agreed.

I think we can make this a cool, optional, like feature...

5 people like this post.

Ted likes this post

etc