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

[DonosOdD]

/\ rofl.


Yes, I ran a recount. Several times, to be precise. No luck.

Is there a way to give points to all members at once instead of one by one? Would save me a lot of work...


Ah yes, something I forgot to state about the Brazilian Portuguese translation: some special characters (like ?, ? and ?) are bugged out in the current version.

I went ahead and fixed that, and added a few lines. Not sure if it's complete but I did my best. As a way of thanking you for this awesome mod, the updated translation is added to this post.


All credits go to the original translator and you, of course.

Cheers!

[Phalynx]

Originally Posted by sweetpotato

I will send you small donation to express my respect for your work when I return home and can use my home computer.
Regards,

Thanks for the donation, very appreciated.

Originally Posted by DonosOdD

/\ rofl.


Yes, I ran a recount. Several times, to be precise. No luck.

Is there a way to give points to all members at once instead of one by one? Would save me a lot of work...

Very strange, as this should reset all points.

Giving points to all users should be possible with a plugin, would require some work at it.

Originally Posted by DonosOdD

Ah yes, something I forgot to state about the Brazilian Portuguese translation: some special characters (like ?, ? and ?) are bugged out in the current version.

I went ahead and fixed that, and added a few lines. Not sure if it's complete but I did my best. As a way of thanking you for this awesome mod, the updated translation is added to this post.


All credits go to the original translator and you, of course.

Cheers!

Thanks for sharing, will include in next release.

[mexl]

Hi,

first of all thank you to the developers for the great extension. We used it for some time and it worked well. As it does not fit the theme changes we did in our forum we deinstalled VBxperience Gold on our VB4 latest forum.
I read through the threads here (before) and figured that there was much confusion of what to do first (files delete, product xml, kill_xperience).

I went for the path of running the kill_xperience first. (For new users: the script is in the Install package under EXTRAS).
It seems it worked, the forum is up and running.
I do not find any addons or modifcations related to xperience in plugins/addons.
In the admin CP I do find the experience link (which of course does not work, as the DB tables are gone).

So far so good.

Next I tried FTP delete the xperience folder, the forum stops working with a white page. So I left the xperience files for now.

Question: what did I forget, not think about?

Developers note is:
1. vBExperience has been removed from database. You must now delete files on your server.
2. PLEASE UNINSTALL THE PRODUCT XML MANUALLY FROM THE PLUGINSYSTEM.
3. YOU WILL ALSO HAVE TO UNINSTALL ALL EXPERIENCE RELATED PLUGINS.
ESPACIALLY IF YOU GET SQL ERRORS LIKE Unknown column 'xperience_done' in 'field list'.

1. I can not do, as the forum stops working
2. and 3. after the kill script there are no references to VBxperience in the pluginsystem

any idea?
thank you,
Matthias

[sivaganeshk]

4.1.1 seems to be beta. I have 4.1.0, is it necessary to have latest version ?

[Wizza]

Is there any way that we can deduct points from an individual account? I run regular competitions where they pay with 'points' but I can't find a way of doing this without going into the database?

[Gn_Snake]

Originally Posted by mexl

Hi,

first of all thank you to the developers for the great extension. We used it for some time and it worked well. As it does not fit the theme changes we did in our forum we deinstalled VBxperience Gold on our VB4 latest forum.
I read through the threads here (before) and figured that there was much confusion of what to do first (files delete, product xml, kill_xperience).

I went for the path of running the kill_xperience first. (For new users: the script is in the Install package under EXTRAS).
It seems it worked, the forum is up and running.
I do not find any addons or modifcations related to xperience in plugins/addons.
In the admin CP I do find the experience link (which of course does not work, as the DB tables are gone).

So far so good.

Next I tried FTP delete the xperience folder, the forum stops working with a white page. So I left the xperience files for now.

Question: what did I forget, not think about?

Developers note is:
1. vBExperience has been removed from database. You must now delete files on your server.
2. PLEASE UNINSTALL THE PRODUCT XML MANUALLY FROM THE PLUGINSYSTEM.
3. YOU WILL ALSO HAVE TO UNINSTALL ALL EXPERIENCE RELATED PLUGINS.
ESPACIALLY IF YOU GET SQL ERRORS LIKE Unknown column 'xperience_done' in 'field list'.

1. I can not do, as the forum stops working
2. and 3. after the kill script there are no references to VBxperience in the pluginsystem

any idea?
thank you,
Matthias

I have the same problem, after upgrade of Vb 4.1.12 and all plugin disabled, i have the blank page on the forum.
I did not understand what could be thought of vBSEO or to htaccess .. but nothing. Until we have rehabilitated vbexperience the plugin and everything has to work reinitiated

Any Idea???

[Alan_SP]

This really seems as serious question, how to deinstall this mod.

[paulvev]

I'm loving this mod, but i have a quick couple of questions.

1. How do i rename "points" to something else? I know i have to change a phrase but not sure where or what to look for.

also
2. I'd like to show points in the postbit, but NOT the coloured bars. The settings dont appear to allow me to do that. Any ideas what to insert in the postbit template and where?

Cheers. Keep up the good work!

[mexl]

Originally Posted by Alan_SP

This really seems as serious question, how to deinstall this mod.

Actually it is...
I deinstalled a few mods without problems. This one is a bit tricky...
Obviously some references in VB seem to be left over and I do not find them.

So any help is appreciated. I am positive that I missed something...

thank you,
Matt

[snowlion]

I don't remember how many times I'd uninstalled and then resinstalled this mod.
So this is my way:
- Uninstall all experience's plugin.
- Uninstall experience's level plugin.
- And use vbExperience411_20120307_BETA.ZIP\extras\Remove vBExperience\upload_via_ftp\admincp/kill_xperience.php for the last step.
- Delete file and folder of vbExperience if you don't want to use it anymore.