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 cheesegrits

Thanks.

FYI, I just wrote a "Helpful Answers for vbCredits" mod, first cut of it is here:

http://www.vbcredits.com/forum/showt...7117#post17117

It's something I needed for myself, but I saw somebody else had requested it, so I posted it. I'm not that wild about supporting it in the long run, though. Once it is debugged and any additional features added, would you be interested in taking it over?

-- hugh

Hugh,

Thanks for releasing this! I don't work with vBcredits so while I'd love to help out I'm probably not the best person to lend any support on this versus someone who knows that tool.

[NLP-er]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

NLP-er i have guven you what you need!, just replace yoursite.com with your actual site and if you do not have a forum folder or the helpful answers software is not in a forum folder then omit the forum/

Sorry I miss your post Great thanks!

[Kintaro81]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Just hide the lowest post or maybe more control...

- hide posts that are negative
- set a min votes before hiding
- let a user unhide

is it possibile with the current version of Helpful Answers?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Kintaro81

is it possibile with the current version of Helpful Answers?

Possible with some work on your end, not out of the box.

[cheesegrits]

Ted,

Just noticed your uninstall code is missing the closing ` on table names in the DROP statements.

-- hugh

[cheesegrits]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Hugh,

Thanks for releasing this! I don't work with vBcredits so while I'd love to help out I'm probably not the best person to lend any support on this versus someone who knows that tool.

There's really nothing to it. Basically just a simple product XML, with a single plugin on one of your hooks that looks at your $helpful setting, and either adds or deducts X amount of credits for the poster, and adds Y amount to the logged on user (i.e. incentive for using Helpful Answers). Plus the usergroup settings for the X and Y values.

Ah well, it was a long shot anyway. I'm just being lazy.

-- hugh

[Ted S]

I've got no problem watching that if it's posted here. Don't make it to other sites much though...

[scabbed]

hello, thanks for this great hack

i have a little question, i would like to know if its possible to show the usefull post under the first post of the thread, so people will have the best answer fast and they don't have to read the all thread to see all members ideas

here is a little screen of what i was thinking about, sry for my english, it's not my native language.

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/5343/sanstitre3j.jpg

thanks in advance

[ragarcia87]

I love this addon I have it installed but I was wondering if I could have it enabled for only a certain thread? I dont need it to be enabled on a whole forum. Thank you.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by scabbed

hello, thanks for this great hack

i have a little question, i would like to know if its possible to show the usefull post under the first post of the thread, so people will have the best answer fast and they don't have to read the all thread to see all members ideas

here is a little screen of what i was thinking about, sry for my english, it's not my native language.

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/5343/sanstitre3j.jpg

thanks in advance

You could do this with some template hacks. The variables to show this information are all in the first post.

I will probably add something like this to version 1.9