Major Additions - vBExperience 4

vBExperience 4.1 for vBulletin 4

Tested with all Version of vBulletin Forum and Suite 4.0.4 -> 4.1.11

Created by Marius Czyz aka Phalynx.

Triple Winner of the "Mod of the Month"-Award (March 2008, September 2009, July 2010) on vBulletin.org.

What is vBExperience?
vBExperience is your free feature packaged solution for motivating your users. vBExperience is an advanced and highly customizable level/promotion and activity measure system with awards, achievements, promotions and activities. It will calculate an activity and experience score for every user based on their activites on the forum. Now your users will see how their level is increasing by participating on your forum.

Communities are not only defined by post count, they need much more parameters: Are the postings the user creates helpful? Are his threads frequently read? Does the user participate on the community by posting pictures, attachments, leaving visitor messages, tagging threads? How can the user's activitiy be compared to others? All this can be answered with this mod. Additionally your users get awards and collect achievements for beeing active on your board.

vBExperience is fully translated to many languages. Beside english there are language files for german, french, italian, portuguese, spanish, swedish and chinese simplified. Polish, turkish, persian are not fully translated.

Comments, suggestions, translations, bugs, etc... are very welcome! Support is only given to people who have clicked "Mark as Installed":
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/vborg_mis...hreadid=245023


/***** Demo *****\
No Demosite currently available.


/***** INSTALLATION *****\
Please read the file readme_install_uninstall_upgrade.txt for detailed instructions!


/***** Primary Support *****\
As vBulletin.org does not offer any help managing modifications, espacially the complex one like vBExperience, I have to decided to open a site together with TheMayhem that is dedicated just for this.
It features a forum not just a single thread, a bug and feature tracker. And you also test our modifications over there.



/***** Featurelist *****\

*** Plugins ***
vBExperience can be easily extended by using it's custom data provider interface (CDP). With the CDP everyone is able to create plugins that integrates into vBExperience calculation process. There are already several plugins like Post Thanks Integration.
The plugins data can also be used to create achievements, awards and also promotions.


*** Insight Experience ***
The insight into your personal experience and what's going on on the community. Currently support basic services like activity and some featured achievements, there are plans to extend this with helpful hints on how progress, depending on users points. Also a statistics module is in work.


*** Awards ***
Motivate your users to be the best in a defined category! With the Awards you are able to reward users who collect the most points, f.e. by making new friends and leading a social group.
The awards are shown in Rankings and Profile. You can set them also to display in postbit near the username. There is a scheduled job running once a day (02:30h) to calculate them.
Via AdminCP they are completely customizeable and can also be assigned manually.

Currently there are six default awards: Most Popular, Activity Award, Posting Award, Community Award, Frequent Poster, Blog Award, Calendar Award, Discussion Ender, Master Tagger, User with most referrers, Downloads, Arm of Law, King of Publishing.
You can create as much awards as you like. Just select a title, choose from one of the 250 images and select the required points for it.


*** Achievements ***
Achievements are very similar to the awards a reward to the user. Unlike an award an achievement is not limited to a single user.
Similar to awards, you can create as much achievements as you like. Just select a title, choose from one of the over 500 images and create the required condition for it.


*** Promotion system ***
The promotion system enables you to move users to other usergroups, depending on their experience points. You can create conditions that have to be met to be promoted. Benefits and extended permissions will be shown automatically to the user. Promotions are showing also possible jumps from current to the next possible group with the required conditions.
Using this you can create multiple groups and assign additional features. Just an example: Usergroup 1 has no custom avatars and just a capacity of 20 private messages. With a condition of 1000 Experience points the user moves to Usergroup 2, where the user is able to upload his own avatar and store more private messages.


*** Rankings ***
Showing User, Level, Awards, Activity Points (experience, thread, post, user, misc) - sortable.


*** Social Groups Rankings ***
Starts the competition between social groups! This feature ranks the groups depending on their average user experience points.


*** Earn Points ***
This is an overview for the user on how points can be collected. It features also a possibility to compare own points to the community's average. All data is beeing pulled automatically from the database.


*** Give Away Points aka Point Donation ***
Users can donate their points to other community members. Choose the field which will be used for give away and select the amount that will be transferred. Admins can donate custom points to the user.


*** Statistics aka Leaderboards ***
The leaderboard is showing a Top-x list of the leading users. Usefull for optimizing points of the point provider. Only enabled point providers with results will be displayed.


*** Shop aka Market ***
vBExperience integrates easily with the Point Market System v3 by TheMayham (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=232676).
It features a virtual item store, username items, bank, gifts, gambling, lottery, and a lot more!
As of vBExperience 4.0, the vBExperience 3.8 Shop has been discontinued.



/***** Collecting Points *****\
vBExperience is collecting points for a user counting his actions in the community. The collected points can be used to reward users with awards, achievements and promotions - even if the collected data comes from a plugin.

Beside the automatic collection, the admin can manually donate custom points to the user, for example for a special reward. Of course you can use this also for awards, achievements and promotions.


Taken into calculation are these things:
Threads
- Creating threads and gaining additional points from views, replies, votes and ratings to this thread
- Creating thread tags
- Making a thread sticky
- Socialgroup Discussions (Discussions, Posts)

Posts
- Creating posts
- Views on attachments (needs "Who Downloaded This Attachment?" installed)

User
- Days since registration
- Average posts per Day (for users who are registered for at least seven days)
- Referrals
- Received infractions
- Given infractions ("Arm of Law")
- Reputation / Use of reputation system
- Visitor messages on profiles
- Creating social groups and getting members
- Uploading pictures
- Making friends
- Completing profile

Misc
- Doing calendar entries
- Writing vBulletin Blogs (vBulletin 4 Suite required)
- Publishing content with vBulletin CMS (vBulletin 4 Suite required)
- Manually assigned points

Additionally there is support for 3rd party modifications:
- Point Market System / Items Shop (included)
- Project Tools (plugin)
- Who Downloaded This Attachment? (plugin)
- DownloadsII v6 (included)
- LDM Links and Downloads Manager (included)
- Abe1 Post Thank You (plugin)
- DBTech Advanced Post Thanks/Like (Lite) (plugin)
- DBTech Advanced @UserTag (plugin)
- Helpful Answers (plugin)
- iTrader (plugin)
- ibProArcade (plugin)
- v3arcade Champions and Submissions (plugin)
- vB Tournaments and Ladders (plugin)
- Advanced Forum Points - set points independent for every forum (plugin)
- Consuming points by downloading attachments ("pay" for attachments) (plugin)
- IWT Time Spent Online (plugin)
- PhotoPost Pro 7 (plugin)
- PhotoPost vBGallery 3 (plugin)
- 8WR Media Library (plugin)
- vBSoccer (plugin)
- vBookie (plugin)
- vBookie Cash (plugin)
- Farcaster's Event Attendance (plugin)
- PhotoPlug (plugin)
- EasyForms (plugin)
- Triple Triad (plugin)
- AWCoding Donation System LITE (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Donation System PRO (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Subscription System PRO (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Credit Purchase System LITE (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Credit Purchase System PRO (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Pirate Poker PRO (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Pirate Poker Platinum (shipped within that product)
- AWCoding Product System PRO (shipped within that product)



You have to install these modifications for your own, vBExperience doesn't install nor touches these.
More addons will be published as soon as they are finished.



/***** Calculation of the activity *****\
The system calculates the activity (week, month and also a custom defined datespan, 60) by counting the actions a user has done. An action can be a post, a new thread, rating, download, etc... The activity bars will be filled during the first weeks. This has changed from earlier versions where just postings, visitor- and group messages have been counted.



/***** Settings *****\
You can control how many points are given to every calculation. For example you can give many points for creating new threads but only a few for views of that thread. Setting a value to 0 will disable a setting.
Many settings regarding the behaviour of vBExperience are making it easy to adjust it to your needs. You can select from 10 colors for the progress bars and also choose from around 250 icons.
Additionally, you can set ignore users (f.e. for bot users), forums (f.e. offtopic forums) and usergroup id's. Please keep in mind that out of the box the usergroupid 6 (Administrators) is beeing ignored.



/***** Performance, especially on Big Boards *****\
vBExperience has been tested on smaller and also on some bigger sites. I know from boards with around 120k users running this mod smoothly. More about this topic can be read in the file readme_optimization.txt



/***** Frequently asked questions *****\
Q: How do I change the name Experience to something new?
A: You can change the name via phrases. Just search and replace all phrases that contains the word "Experience".

Q: When installing vBExperience, does everyone start from scratch, or will it automatically configure everyone's points based on actions before the install?
A: If you recount, vBExperience will calculate ALL existing data since the beginning of the board. If you used vBCredits, vBActivity, uCash and similar systems - there is no need to convert the points.

Q: My conditions don't work correctly on achievements and promotions.
A: Conditions in achievements and promotions are calculated in POINTS, not in count of items.
If you create an achievement for reaching the first 10 Days, you must enter the points needed for this. If you reward 2 points for every day, you have to set 2 points for every day since registering. Calculation: 10 days * 2 points = 20 as condition. So you will have to set 20 as the condition.

Credits for images
- FAMFAMFAM, http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
- IconExperience



/***** History *****\

vBExperience 4.1.1

Please reinstall ALL plugins you are using from the ZIP\Plugins! Espacially if you get SQL Errors after reinstalling vBExperience.

- Fixed Plugin for 8WR_Media_Library
- Fixed Plugin for Advanced_Forum_Points
- Fixed Plugin for Attachment_Consumes_Points
- Fixed Plugin for EasyForms
- Fixed Plugin for Post_Thanks_Abe1
- Fixed border around boxes
- Fixed not correctly saving award images
- Extended character length for manual award assignment
- Several smaller fixes

vBExperience 4.1.0, 16th December 2011

- Introduced the feature to start the calculation by a defined date. By default all data will be considered for calculation. Please keep in mind that there are some data that cannot be filtered by date, like added friends. You need to re-install all plugins to have them obeying the new calculation limit. This feature has been sponsored by BryanB. Thanks!
- Fixed Discussion Ender, can be now disabled by setting value to 0
- Fixed Arm of Law, can be now disabled by setting value to 0
- Insight: Optimized layout
- Insight: Optimized colours for darker styles
- Achievement "Three Friends" renamed to "Social" (does not affect existing achievement)
- Renamed point descriptions so they can be identified better as point system (f.e. Days since registered -> Points for every day since registration)
- Added: Romanian Translation (thanks to Teascu Dorin)
- Custom Points can now have a category, can be used as entry point for other modifications using vBExperience points, eg. Market/Shop purchases
- Fixed several smaller issues

Changelog for other versions is in history.txt

[micheal332001]

also getting this error as well

PHP Code:

Database error in vBulletin 4.0.6:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT
        COUNT(*) AS cnt_ach,
        i.achievementid,
        a.title,
        a.description,
        a.imagebig
        FROM vb3_xperience_achievements_issues AS i
        INNER JOIN vb3_xperience_achievements AS a ON a.achievementid=i.achievementid
        GROUP BY achievementid
        ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC
        LIMIT 1;

MySQL Error   : Invalid use of group function 


[Phalynx]

Achievements and Awards are not working with MySQL 4.1 - either you upgrade this too or you will have to disable both features.

[micheal332001]

Originally Posted by Phalynx

Achievements and Awards are not working with MySQL 4.1 - either you upgrade this too or you will have to disable both features.

thankyou im just getting the mysql upgraded and will let you know if there are any more problems once its done.

[Phalynx]

Good luck!

[micheal332001]

maybe you should put in the description that mysql version ? is required to use this script so you dont get questions like this again.

[Phalynx]

You are the third that is having a problem with that old MySQL version. I will include this in the readme.

On the other side, many people are not reading much...

[Mases]

I'm having some trouble getting it set up appropriately for my forums, so I need some assistance in what to do.

So in the admin CP, where you can edit the posts per day, posts per 7 days, etc., the first thing I tried to do was disable the scheduled task and put the information in myself. I also went based off individual users, so for instance I put in 5 posts per day, 20 posts per 7 days, and 40 per 30 days. I also set the timeframe for activity to 30 days. So, I recounted everything and it did not show up accurately for most people. Those who had only posted maybe 3 times in the last 7 days had 99% activity, and some people who had not even logged onto the forums or made a post in over a year had an overall activity of 99%. Also, after doing all of this and still having the scheduled task disabled, it automatically put in variables for posts per day when I thought that disabling the task would prevent it from doing this. This resulted in it automatically putting in like 92.3 for every calculation (92.3 posts per day, 7 days, and 30 days), which did not make sense to me.

Alternatively, I have tried to leave the scheduled task running and let it do it on its own, but I manually put in a 30 day timeframe for activity. The calclulations would change on their own, as expected, but it would make them too high, like I mentioned above with it having like 90 some posts per day in each time variable. And still, those who had not logged on would have percentages of activity that they should not have had.

So basically, I'm not getting an accurate reading on the activity levels. In my mind, users who have not logged in, made any posts, etc., within the set time frame, they should have a 0% activity level for everything. Seeing as how it auto-corrects to a higher number, I am thinking that maybe it goes by the entire forums posts per day, per 7 days, etc., but then it wouldn't make sense for the scheduled task to make all of these the same number of posts.

I would like to have an idea of how to set this up appropriately. There seems to be too many problems that I am having and I know the system works, its just that I do not fully understand how it works or how to make it work in the way that I am thinking it should. So any help on this would be greatly appreciated and the sooner the better. Thanks.

[micheal332001]

Originally Posted by Phalynx

You are the third that is having a problem with that old MySQL version. I will include this in the readme.

On the other side, many people are not reading much...

upgraded the mysql but beleave me it makes alot of problems with vb once the mysql is upgraded.
All the index's are out and you will need to run the mysql-schema.php file thats in the install folder to fix the index and then you will have to run the Repair / Optimize Tables to fix other problems or even re-install some products as well.

[Phalynx]

Originally Posted by Mases

I'm having some trouble getting it set up appropriately for my forums, so I need some assistance in what to do.

So in the admin CP, where you can edit the posts per day, posts per 7 days, etc., the first thing I tried to do was disable the scheduled task and put the information in myself. I also went based off individual users, so for instance I put in 5 posts per day, 20 posts per 7 days, and 40 per 30 days. I also set the timeframe for activity to 30 days. So, I recounted everything and it did not show up accurately for most people. Those who had only posted maybe 3 times in the last 7 days had 99% activity, and some people who had not even logged onto the forums or made a post in over a year had an overall activity of 99%. Also, after doing all of this and still having the scheduled task disabled, it automatically put in variables for posts per day when I thought that disabling the task would prevent it from doing this. This resulted in it automatically putting in like 92.3 for every calculation (92.3 posts per day, 7 days, and 30 days), which did not make sense to me.

Alternatively, I have tried to leave the scheduled task running and let it do it on its own, but I manually put in a 30 day timeframe for activity. The calclulations would change on their own, as expected, but it would make them too high, like I mentioned above with it having like 90 some posts per day in each time variable. And still, those who had not logged on would have percentages of activity that they should not have had.

So basically, I'm not getting an accurate reading on the activity levels. In my mind, users who have not logged in, made any posts, etc., within the set time frame, they should have a 0% activity level for everything. Seeing as how it auto-corrects to a higher number, I am thinking that maybe it goes by the entire forums posts per day, per 7 days, etc., but then it wouldn't make sense for the scheduled task to make all of these the same number of posts.

I would like to have an idea of how to set this up appropriately. There seems to be too many problems that I am having and I know the system works, its just that I do not fully understand how it works or how to make it work in the way that I am thinking it should. So any help on this would be greatly appreciated and the sooner the better. Thanks.

How long is your board running with vBExperience 4? Are you using activities? These are important questions, as the activitiy is being counted from the count of recorded actions in the given timeframe. The activity cannot be accurate by just using data from the last two weeks.

I would suggest to leave the system alone and wait until it finds the correct acitivity for everyone.

Originally Posted by micheal332001

upgraded the mysql but beleave me it makes alot of problems with vb once the mysql is upgraded.
All the index's are out and you will need to run the mysql-schema.php file thats in the install folder to fix the index and then you will have to run the Repair / Optimize Tables to fix other problems or even re-install some products as well.

Yes, an upgrade is not just replacing the binaries.

[micheal332001]

Originally Posted by Phalynx

Yes, an upgrade is not just replacing the binaries.

but everything is working now with this add-on.

Thanks for your help.

I might be making an add-on for this for the signature maker i have made,
so if someone makes a signature it will give them some points or something but will re-move points if they re-do there signature within x amount of days.