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.

[Milez]

First of all a huge round of applause for both this awesome plugin and his work on many others. You rock Ted

Now to an issue I (and likely others) have. Concerning highlighting the top rated post with this code in all instances of class="alt1" or class="alt2" in your postbit template:

<if condition="$thread[toppost] == $post[postid]">background-color:#CCCCCC;</if>

This works fine. Unfortunately it has 2 unusual problems that make it unusable (at least for me):

1. If you click edit on the post, you lose the BG color changes.
2. if you receive a PM from a user with a high rated post, the BG color will appear. Very strange as I understand the if conditional but not sure why this occurs :/

Feel free to PM Ted and I could show you this on my dev machine.

[Milez]

Hmm perhaps an 'if page is Showthread' conditional is needed to solve no. 2. Not so sure about 1 though.

[Ted S]

Interesting stuff.

Edit post I don't think I can do much about and of course it's only something seen in select instances.

For the second issue add AND THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread' to the conditional.

[mohammad6006]

how can i enable this plugin just for one forum?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by mohammad6006

how can i enable this plugin just for one forum?

by default this is off in all forums so you'd just want to enable it in one.

[Milez]

Ted just wanted to confirm for you that AND THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread' fixes the issue with the PMs as it should. So for anyone else background colors for highlighting top post can be like:

<if condition="$thread[toppost] == $post[postid] AND THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread'">background-color:#CCCCCC;</if>

Do you have any idea what file is being called when posts are edited? Did anyone else get around the background color changes not taking effect after a post edit?

[Ted S]

When a post is edited inline it's an ajax javascript call so there is no script associated... it's all javascript.

[Quantnet]

Good stuff, Ted
I have been using 1.5.4 for a while and only get to play with the latest version until now.
When I tried to use ha_import to import the thanks mod to this, it ran halfway and got this error

Invalid SQL:
UPDATE post SET totalrank=totalrank + 1,
goodrank=goodrank + 1 WHERE postid = 548;

MySQL Error : Unknown column 'totalrank' in 'field list'
Error Number : 1054

[mohammad6006]

Originally Posted by Ted S

by default this is off in all forums so you'd just want to enable it in one.

no

i say another thing

i want this plugin just work for one section

for example on this forum we have General vBulletin Discussions and Programming Discussions
i want this plugin enable for Programming Discussions and no need this plugin in other forums

xcuz for bad english

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by mohammad6006

no

i say another thing

i want this plugin just work for one section

for example on this forum we have General vBulletin Discussions and Programming Discussions
i want this plugin enable for Programming Discussions and no need this plugin in other forums

xcuz for bad english

Like I said, you can enable it in just one forum.