Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Post Rating System (plus many sub-features)

Note: While this modification is updated for compatibility, I am only developing features for the 4.x version. I understand many sites continue to use 3.8 for a variety of reasons but dual developing takes time away from adding anything new. I encourage you to develop out your own change and share them back as no modification is ideal for every forum out of the box.

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 (AJAX) to rate individual posts as either helpful or not allowing future visitors to understand the benefits of each post.

Designed for maximum flexibility:


This addon is built to be flexible and offers several customization options including:

• The ability to show a user's vote stats in posts
• The ability to use image or text ratings.
• The ability to offer yes/no or scaled 1-10 point ranking.
• The ability to turn off negative ratings for a positive only system.
• The ability to decide which forums are open for helpful answer ratings.
• The ability to audit the system and identify top users and potential abusers.
• The ability to ban specific members from using the system.
• The ability to customize the AJAX message shown after a post is rated.
• The ability to edit all text and messages through phrases.
• The ability to show a page with the top helpful posts.
• The ability to show rating stats on a user's profile.
• Integration with the reputation system for ratings.
• Template driven display that can easily be customized to 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.

Load & Scale:
This addon is designed to work with small to large sites and is currently being used by sites with more than 2 million posts. If you have questions about integrating with your big board please contact me.

Modification Installation:
This addon requires uploading multiple files, installing a vBulletin product and enabling the feature in any forums you wish. No template modifications are required. Please see the included install file for detailed instructions.

If you are not seeing the rating bar double check that you have enabled the feature in the forum you are in and insure the Manual Template override option is not enabled.

Rating Review & Deletion:
To identify and remove abuse a reporting system is included with this addon and can be found in your vBulletin ACP under the Helpful Answers tab. Through this panel you will be able to view a user's overall rating history and individual ratings and can remove either if necessary. Users can also be explicitly banned from the system.

Reputation System Integration:
Helpful Answers can be extended to directly tie into your reputation system giving users positive or negative points based on the ratings of their posts. There are numerous options on how to handle ratings that can be found in a separate Helpful Answers Reputation part of your vBulletin Settings page.

External Integration:
vB Plaza Modification - http://www.vbplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6359
vB Experience - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=199556

Anonymous Stats Tracking (optional):
vBulletin forums reach millions of consumers around the world yet little is known about their habits and opinions. This addon was released to the public out of requests but also to further the research of forum user's behaviors and actions through collecting the most basic data on thousands of sites.

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.

While you may disable this feature through the administrative options I ask that you consider leaving it in place to help this research effort and insure the continued support of the addon.

The tracking feature uses the php library cURL on a 5 second timeout. If cURL is not installed this option is automatically disabled.

Updates:
- 5/13/2011 - Release of 2.0.6 minor bug fix
- 08/31/2009 - Release of 2.0.0
- 08/07/2009 - Release of 1.9.5 stable

Other Versions:
This addon will work with 3.7 but to avoid issues with different code versions please see the 3.7 version thread here.

Before you download this modification please remember this is a free tool provided as a courtesy to you and support responses are subject to the availability of the author and other members. If you are looking for a professionally supported system this is not the solution for you.

[Capper5016]

Heres what I did.....had a little trouble trying to think how I worded it:

<fieldset class="statistics_group">
            <legend>$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_title]</legend>
            <ul class="list_no_decoration">
<img src="images/buttons/ha_thumbsup.gif" width="11" height="20" border="0" alt="Good" /><strong> $helpfulposts[goodranks]</strong>   <span>Posts Receiving Positive Votes</span><br /> 
<img src="images/buttons/ha_thumbsdn.gif" width="11" height="20" border="0" alt="Bad" /><strong> $helpfulposts[badranks]</strong>   <span>Posts Receiving Negative Votes</span>            
            </ul>
            
        </fieldset>

Then I used the Phrase manager to edit $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_title] and changed "Helpful Postings" to "Member Posting Reputation"

Results:


Now this has me wanting to tie it in with Cyb's Advanced Forum Stats, adding the ability to list the users with the most positive and negative votes.

[Ted S]

Have to be logged in for that page but I'm glad you got it working. If you want to change things even further you can edit the template to remove the phrases and just write things in the format you want.

As for the top thread, the template to change is postbit or postbit legacy depending on your forum's setup.

[Capper5016]

Posted a screenshot so people could see the result.....

I tried using

<img src="images/buttons/ha_thumbsup.gif" width="11" height="20" border="0" alt="Good" /><strong> $helpfulposts[goodranks]</strong>   <span>Posts</span><br /> 
<img src="images/buttons/ha_thumbsdn.gif" width="11" height="20" border="0" alt="Bad" /><strong> $helpfulposts[badranks]</strong>   <span>Posts</span>

I tried to get the Members Posting Reputation to appear under their avatar in the postbit, but it doesnt work. The icons display but the numbers won't.

I need to figure out where in the postbit to place the top thread phrase, and the conditional that changes the box color.

[Ted S]

The member's reputation is not available in postbit as I mentioned before. So while you get an A for using the right code there's nothing to pull data for those variables.

As for the color, I'm not entirely sure which table cell (<td>) you'd want to change... try poking around with a few until you find the one that gives you the look you want.

[Capper5016]

I wasnt using the Reputation plugin I made my own "Member Post Reputation", that was just an attempt to see if I could use those conditionals within the postbit, or anywhere else. I think being able to add this to site stats or something like that would be awesome.

I need to figure out how to use color in this instance, Its been a long time since I've tinkered this deeply in VBulletin code.

<if condition="$threadinfo[toppost] == $post[postid]">

How would you wrap this in a color tag? Anyone, not just Ted.

[Ted S]

As I mentioned before, the variables for a member's overall reputation aren't available because adding them would require an additional server query for every post -- which is not acceptable.

[Capper5016]

<if condition="$threadinfo[toppost] == $post[postid]">

Where the heck would I even post this question to get an answer? I need to find out how to wrap it in color tags, and then find out where to place it, in which template.

Ted, thanks for your input on the customizations......feel free to take the rest of the night off.

[Ted S]

I can't tell you where to place it as I haven't poked around enough but I already told you the template (postbit or postbig_legacy depending on your settings).

As far as how to use it,

<td class="alt1" <if condition="$threadinfo[toppost] == $post[postid]">style="background-color:red;"</if> >

Would make a table cell (<td>) colored red if it's the top post.

I'd suggest opening the right template and just playing. You can create a new style as a child and edit that so your members don't see what you're doing until it's complete.

[Capper5016]

I give up, mod works great....nuff said.

[maidos]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Template edits will let you do exactly what you want; you just need to use the right variable (good rank). All you need to is change the phrase to +{1} and it will show +6 votes if that's the total good votes.

The votes will appear before a user votes themselves... If there are any votes (we don't show 0 of 0).

The image paths are hard coded if you use phrases... If you remove the phrase you can make them however you like.

my intention is to allow users to view the votes before voting themself. Thats what im after.
im not entirely sure but i got lost somewhere btw the phrase because when i did remove it doesnt display anything.

this is the phrase helpfulanswer_x_out_of_y where i can add the pictures together with the votes right? how can i do that since im not sure how to code that