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.

[Michlerish]

I installed this according to the instructions, it's enabled in all forums, the "Manual Template Override" is set to NO.... but it's not appearing anywhere on the forum.

A friend is having the exact same issue on his forum too.

We are running vb4.0.6 and downloaded the 404 file for this mod.

What is going wrong?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Michlerish

I installed this according to the instructions, it's enabled in all forums, the "Manual Template Override" is set to NO.... but it's not appearing anywhere on the forum.

A friend is having the exact same issue on his forum too.

We are running vb4.0.6 and downloaded the 404 file for this mod.

What is going wrong?

Did you change any other options or modify your postbit / legacy template?

[Michlerish]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Did you change any other options or modify your postbit / legacy template?

No, I thought that was optional and not necessary. Is that needed to get it working/visible (referring to the template edit mentioned in first post of thread)?

[BadgerDog]

Thanks Ted ...

Before I venture down the road of installing this in our 4.04 site, two questions for either you, or perhaps others can answer them ...

1. Can this mod peacefully co-exist with the very popular "Thank You" mod? Any reported problems? If so, is it logical to have both running simultaneously, or would that create confusion amongst users?

2. We have years of the add-on mod "Thank You" records from members in tens of thousands of posts built up on our site. I think our members would freak if they disappeared by turning that mod off suddenly. Has anyone ever thought about writing a conversion mod that would take those records for each post and convert each "thank you" to a "Thumbs Up" vote for the post, essentially preserving the historical perspective for members of old posts?

Thanks again for your work ... appreciate it ... :up:

Regards,
Badger

[KProjects]

Love the mod - thanks!

It was working great on my site.. then i switched from litespeed to apache w/ mod_security and get this error if a thumbs up/down is clicked:

Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: Invalid curl configuration option in [path]/helpfulanswers.php on line 483

Line 483 is:
curl_setopt($curlHandle, CURLOPT_MUTE, 1); // dont show output

If you reload the page it shows that your helpful vote registered, and the error is gone.

I'm running v2.3.3 - latest version..

Any ideas?

[KProjects]

Update: fixed it by disabling anonymous reporting...

[SemperFideles]

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

Thanks Ted ...

Before I venture down the road of installing this in our 4.04 site, two questions for either you, or perhaps others can answer them ...

1. Can this mod peacefully co-exist with the very popular "Thank You" mod? Any reported problems? If so, is it logical to have both running simultaneously, or would that create confusion amongst users?

2. We have years of the add-on mod "Thank You" records from members in tens of thousands of posts built up on our site. I think our members would freak if they disappeared by turning that mod off suddenly. Has anyone ever thought about writing a conversion mod that would take those records for each post and convert each "thank you" to a "Thumbs Up" vote for the post, essentially preserving the historical perspective for members of old posts?

Thanks again for your work ... appreciate it ... :up:

Regards,
Badger

Badger,

I've been running the Post Thank You hack for years as well. What I did was leave the Thank You hack installed but set the threshold for new Thanks to a post number way above what anyone can reach. By doing so, all the previously thanked posts still have who thanked them. The two addons co-exist fine.

I could have left the Post Thank You hack available to Thank New Posts as well as have the users find a post helpful but I opted to switch over users to Helpful Posts.

I really liked the Post Thank You hack but the author has pretty much abandoned it and some of the old features like the ability to see what posts a user has been thanked for look like they're not going to be available for vB4.

I think the Helpful Answers switchover will be better in time as it has so many advantages to displaying the Helpful Posts within a thread. I also think the author of this hack has found a nice way to parlay Open Source in a way that it is in his interest to support it long term whereas Post Thanks relies on the good will of users to support his continued coding (something that is sadly very rare).

[BadgerDog]

Originally Posted by SemperFideles

What I did was leave the Thank You hack installed but set the threshold for new Thanks to a post number way above what anyone can reach. By doing so, all the previously thanked posts still have who thanked them. The two addons co-exist fine.

Thanks Ted ...

Makes sense ....

When you say you set the "post number" way above, do you really mean Post Count Needed to Give Thanks?

I couldn't find any other reference to a something that would be a quantity of posts.

So, essentially, the thanks icon disappeared for members and your new "Helpful Answers" appeared simultaneously.

Doesn't the Thank You mod have the advantage of being more personalized in that a person sees the individual member's name who left him that positive expression?

Thanks again for your work .. I use almost all of your mods and the are first rate and reliable ... :up:

Regards,
Badger

[SemperFideles]

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

Thanks Ted ...

Makes sense ....

When you say you set the "post number" way above, do you really mean Post Count Needed to Give Thanks?

I couldn't find any other reference to a something that would be a quantity of posts.

So, essentially, the thanks icon disappeared for members and your new "Helpful Answers" appeared simultaneously.

Doesn't the Thank You mod have the advantage of being more personalized in that a person sees the individual member's name who left him that positive expression?

Thanks again for your work .. I use almost all of your mods and the are first rate and reliable ... :up:

Regards,
Badger

Badger,

My name is Rich. Ted's the coder of this app but I thought I'd answer your question as a board owner who has gone through the same thing you're going through.

1. Yes, I meant Post Count needed to Give Thanks. I raised the level to 100000
2. Yes, the Post Thank You button and the Helpful Answers thing will appear simultaneously (assuming you don't set Post Count level high as in 1.) Since I raised the Post Count needed to give thanks, users can no longer see the Thanks button but, because the Post Thank You hack is still installed, users can see who thanked posts before I raised the post count needed. In other words, I'm weaning users away from the Post Thanks and, in a couple of years, I'll probably just uninstall the Post Thanks hack altogether.
3. Yes, right now the Post Thank You hack allows you to see who thanked the poster but Ted just noted that he was going to mod this application to make this an option for the Helpful Answers product. It will completely replace everything good about Post Thanks when he does that.

As for your previous question about importing old Thanks Data into the Helpful answers hack, I'm sure it could be done with some sort of SQL query but I'm not sophisticated enough to know how to do that.

[BadgerDog]

Originally Posted by SemperFideles

Badger,

My name is Rich. Ted's the coder of this app but I thought I'd answer your question as a board owner who has gone through the same thing you're going through.

Thanks Rich ...

Missed the poster name and just assumed ...

Appreciate you taking the time for the extensively detailed answer ...

It helps a lot .. :up:

Regards,
Badger (Doug)
RSM - Ret'd