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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by danicamps

Hi, I think I may be trying to do the same thing as Radiofranky
My end goal is to have the total rank display on the forum display - the full list of threads. I have attached a screen shot for clarification, but essentially, I would like to have the total number of votes showing on the forum homepage in either the Replies/Views column or in the Title/Thread Starter Column.
Thank you in advance!
Best,
d

The difficulty here is that votes are stored on the post level, not thread, although the threadid is tracked. The easiest hack would be to query for each thread and get the count but that's terribly inefficient.

Thus you can either make a big modification and build a new thread coutner [which the next version of the mod will do] or be a little less crazy and just run a tally process via cron once a day or such. Really depends on your volume / desire to tweak around.

Neither is crazy complex but it's not changing a font color either...

[Poker Face]

Originally Posted by Ted S

The mod floats a div to make this work. You can nest it in a parent element, remove the margin / padding as you see fit.

Just search for the helpful_answers template and go from there.

I appreciate the follow-up, Ted S, but a little additional guidance would be very much appreciated!

If not by you, anyone that understands this advice, I would appreciate the additional guidance!

I'm assuming that once in the; Customize Template: helpful_answers screen, that I am looking for this:

PHP Code:

<div id="helpfulanswers_box_{vb:raw post.postid}" style="text-align:right;"> 


And if so, what would I add?

Thank-You in advance!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Poker Face

I appreciate the follow-up, Ted S, but a little additional guidance would be very much appreciated!

If not by you, anyone that understands this advice, I would appreciate the additional guidance!

I'm assuming that once in the; Customize Template: helpful_answers screen, that I am looking for this:

PHP Code:

<div id="helpfulanswers_box_{vb:raw post.postid}" style="text-align:right;"> 


And if so, what would I add?

Thank-You in advance!

It depends on what you wish to do exactly and how. If you want to align something equal to another line you would float that line as well. If you want this to appear on top of other elements but not have space you would set the padding / margin to 0.

If css is new to you I highly suggest referring to a css tutorial such as the one at http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp - while you can certainly find help around here, the more you want to customize, the more useful it is to know the basics yourself.

[danicamps]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Thus you can either make a big modification and build a new thread coutner [which the next version of the mod will do] or be a little less crazy and just run a tally process via cron once a day or such. Really depends on your volume / desire to tweak around.

Neither is crazy complex but it's not changing a font color either...

Ted, Thank you for the quick reply. Is this something that I could use Helpful Threads for? Trying to eliminate any manual process as much as possible. When looking at Helpful Answers, I wasn't sure which mod would be best. The most important feature is to have users voting up or down on a thread - not necessarily the underlying posts and have that tallying (to where any vote on a post is not going to change the vote count of the thread). Am I correct in my thinking that using Helpful Answers, this is happening, but just not able to display on the forum home page?

Also, thank you for your continued work on the module - it is awesome, I'm just very new to VBulletin and trying to set up functionality very quickly.

Best,
d

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by danicamps

Ted, Thank you for the quick reply. Is this something that I could use Helpful Threads for? Trying to eliminate any manual process as much as possible. When looking at Helpful Answers, I wasn't sure which mod would be best. The most important feature is to have users voting up or down on a thread - not necessarily the underlying posts and have that tallying (to where any vote on a post is not going to change the vote count of the thread). Am I correct in my thinking that using Helpful Answers, this is happening, but just not able to display on the forum home page?

Also, thank you for your continued work on the module - it is awesome, I'm just very new to VBulletin and trying to set up functionality very quickly.

Best,
d

HA is very much a post mod and voting takes place per post.

While you could certainly hack things around to show a thread vote, it's not designed to work per thread so if you want to accomplish that you're starting with a solid base but have a number of tweaks to make to limit voting, change the display places, and tally things up to a more useful way.

[danicamps]

Originally Posted by Ted S

HA is very much a post mod and voting takes place per post.

While you could certainly hack things around to show a thread vote, it's not designed to work per thread so if you want to accomplish that you're starting with a solid base but have a number of tweaks to make to limit voting, change the display places, and tally things up to a more useful way.

Ted, I think I see the issues you were mentioning. Right now, we are using HA and it works great for the threads, unless there is a post underneath and then voting on it creates a duplicated thread in the threadlist. With that in mind, would Helpful Threads be something that we should use instead. We want people to be able to create posts to threads, but we do not need them to be able to vote for the posts - only the thread.
I am not sure how we would go in and limit voting or change the display places with HA.

Thanks,
d

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by danicamps

Ted, I think I see the issues you were mentioning. Right now, we are using HA and it works great for the threads, unless there is a post underneath and then voting on it creates a duplicated thread in the threadlist. With that in mind, would Helpful Threads be something that we should use instead. We want people to be able to create posts to threads, but we do not need them to be able to vote for the posts - only the thread.
I am not sure how we would go in and limit voting or change the display places with HA.

Thanks,
d

I'm not aware of a Helpful Threads mod but if someone created such a program it would definitely make more sense to use.

[danicamps]

That would probably be because I think I made it up in my head..
I think I was reading some of the forum posts on the different Helpful Answers mods and cross referenced..
Can you go into any more detail about how to limit the voting. Is there ways to limit the voting to the thread only and not allow at the post level?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by danicamps

Can you go into any more detail about how to limit the voting. Is there ways to limit the voting to the thread only and not allow at the post level?

There's no quick way to limit it to thread level... the mod doesn't care about threads, it works off of posts and just tracks a threadid here and there for displaying back info.

What you would need to do is change out that functionality to take advantage of the core code be rework how the voting is tallied and displayed. It's not a full rewrite but it's significant.

[Lester Wilson]

Hello, great mod, installed

One question, i have many forum areas on my site, i'd like to take advanathe of the option to update multiple forums through the Bulk Forum Enabler located in the Helpful Answers Tab

However i cannot locate the tab. Can some one pointn me to the location of this tab? I dont see it on the forum management dialogue, or in the settings options for this mod.

Where is it?

Installation Instructions:

Step 3) Enable the system in any of your forums by visiting the forum options and scrolling to the end of the page.

Alternatively you can update multiple forums through the Bulk Forum Enabler located in the Helpful Answers Tab.(Required)