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.

[Simon Lloyd]

Disregard the above post....i looked back through this thread and ran the ha_revote.php found here at Post 413

[Ted S]

Great! Let me know how 1.6 works for you.

[Simon Lloyd]

Ted, is it possible to change a couple of things?, when viewing the helpful answers page a rated thread shows like this

Post 258689 in thread: COUNT

but the link (in this case COUNT) takes you directly to a single post which happens to be the post it mentions i.e 258689. Could we possible have the Post xxxxx as a link to the post and the in thread link COUNT to link to the entire thread rather than a single post? maybe rather than have Post xxxxx in...etc how about This Post (as a link) in thread COUNT (as a link) or would that be too many queries?

As an addition, would it be possible to have a date show for when it was last tagged as helpful?

[nascartr]

Good ideas Simon.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

Ted, is it possible to change a couple of things?, when viewing the helpful answers page a rated thread shows like thisbut the link (in this case COUNT) takes you directly to a single post which happens to be the post it mentions i.e 258689. Could we possible have the Post xxxxx as a link to the post and the in thread link COUNT to link to the entire thread rather than a single post? maybe rather than have Post xxxxx in...etc how about This Post (as a link) in thread COUNT (as a link) or would that be too many queries?

As an addition, would it be possible to have a date show for when it was last tagged as helpful?

That's all actually pretty straight forward. I've posted 1.6.8 to this post which changes the post link to the post within the thread (which makes a lot of sense).

For the date, I assumed you meant on the top helpful answers page as well. I've added a column with this data.

[Ted S]

Today I released 1.7.0 stable.

This update incorporates two small changes adding a last vote column to the top helpful posts page and linking top helpful posts to their full thread to put them in context.

More importantly however 1.7.0 marks the end of the 1.6.x beta series which has been up for a few weeks.

With 1.7 there's a complete change in how post vote summaries are stored (summaries contain the total votes, good votes and last vote time). This change moves away from using the main post table and adds a new table just for helpful answers. For most sites this won't mark a notable difference but for larger sites it will reduce load and limit the number of edits to the post table.

1.7.0 is designed to convert anyone from 1.5.x without notable impact but if you do find yourself missing votes simply run the script ha_revote.php as found in the tools & samples post and your vote history will be resynced.

I look forward to hearing all of your suggestions and comments for 1.8!

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by Ted S

That's all actually pretty straight forward. I've posted 1.6.8 to this post which changes the post link to the post within the thread (which makes a lot of sense).

For the date, I assumed you meant on the top helpful answers page as well. I've added a column with this data.

Thanks for taking those on board Ted, much appreciated, however i just upgraded to 1.7.0 as 1.6.8 wasn't available but you haven't added those things to 1.7

Any chance of adding it or mailing it or.........?

[Simon Lloyd]

My mistake Ted, 1.7 does have those things, it's just at first glance it didn't seem to!

How can i get rid of Post 228819 in thread:? as for me it seems enough to just have the thread title and a link to it.

[Loller]

Ted S, thank you for this great (!) mod. Can u add in 1.8.0 ability to hide lowest rated post?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

My mistake Ted, 1.7 does have those things, it's just at first glance it didn't seem to!

How can i get rid of Post 228819 in thread:? as for me it seems enough to just have the thread title and a link to it.

You can edit the bit template and remove this from the HTML. If you need help let keep know.