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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Spinball

I have over 3,000 concurrent users online. Has anyone tested the performance of their forum with this mod installed when they have that number of active users?

there are a few big board sites using this although I don't know their volume levels. Keep in mind that while there are queries when someone votes under the default settings none are added to the showthread page... Instead there is a join on the existing query and some php conditionals.

I suspect the biggest issue will be installing the mod as it adds two fields to the post table which can take sometime if your site has a few million posts.

[Spinball]

Originally Posted by Ted S

there are a few big board sites using this although I don't know their volume levels. Keep in mind that while there are queries when someone votes under the default settings none are added to the showthread page... Instead there is a join on the existing query and some php conditionals.

I suspect the biggest issue will be installing the mod as it adds two fields to the post table which can take sometime if your site has a few million posts.

8 and a half million. Might it be worth combining the two alterations to the post table into one query?

[Ted S]

At 8.5 MM posts I'd actually suggest removing the table alter queries from the plugin entirely and running them via mySQL shell to avoid a timeout from your browser or the potential impact of a failed connection part way through.

[DarkWarriorXII]

Okay I've tested some things and text other than $helpful_answers (for example, random text) will appear on every post when inserted where $helpful_answers should be. When using either automatic or manual insert mode, it still only shows on the first post of each page. This is also true on a default style I installed that has no customizations at all.

[Spinball]

Is it at all possible to have this mod without altering any tables? Surely best practise would be not to alter the vB tables, but add new tables where needed?

[Ted S]

There's no best practice I'm aware of to avoid editing tables. Counts are stored with the post table because that's what's already being called.

It's certainly possible to do just about any mod without altering existing tables but I chose to alter the ones that made sense to alter as opposed to increasing queries and load by adding new ones which have to joined in.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by DarkWarriorXII

Okay I've tested some things and text other than $helpful_answers (for example, random text) will appear on every post when inserted where $helpful_answers should be. When using either automatic or manual insert mode, it still only shows on the first post of each page. This is also true on a default style I installed that has no customizations at all.

Please check your settings and let me know if you have enabled the mod to not show in the first post.

[Spinball]

Originally Posted by Ted S

There's no best practice I'm aware of to avoid editing tables. Counts are stored with the post table because that's what's already being called.

It's certainly possible to do just about any mod without altering existing tables but I chose to alter the ones that made sense to alter as opposed to increasing queries and load by adding new ones which have to joined in.

Thanks for the reply. I'm of the feeling that it's probably not a good idea to alter the core tables of vBulletin even though so many hacks do it - including the immensely popular Post Thanks mod.
If the post table is absolutely huge like ours then it could possibly be argued that adding a couple of fields may have more detrimental effect than adding a new table and join element to the sql.

What drew me to your mod was the system they have on http://www.hotukdeals.com/

[Ted S]

Definitely good points although I'm clearly not against to editing the tables for logical storage and felt that it was appropriate here as what I was storing was summary post information. My pet peeve is when mods use generic names on their edits causing future updates or other mods to conflict... which is why I tend to use longer and more obscure field names.

For a larger board having the data stored in another table may make more sense although I'm not sure which is better (holding two more fields or joining one more table). Any ideas of the performance difference?

This mod would be fairly simple to extend to use a different table but I'm just not sure it's worth the import routines and work versus expanding the feature-set.

[Ted S]

I looked at the code to be sure my last statement is right and it is... If you just wanted to do core voting without some of the profile enhancements you'd be looking at 3 or 4 edits. To get every feature down to the logs and what not working it's a bit more but still nothing crazy.