Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Allow users to rate individual posts

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 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.

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.

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.

History of this addon:

This addon was originally developed for private use in 2006 for a site of mine but after getting several past clients requested requests and messages I decided to package it up for public release.

[Ted S]

Version 1.5.1 has been released.

This is a minor fix that adds a redundancy check to insure votes on the ten point scale option are not over 10 points.

This update also removes an extra > character in the options area.

Upgrading is optional.

[guvner]

Hi Ted

We've been discussing this your mod at my forum today, and one member asked if the cell under the post with the most votes could change color to help distinguish it from other posts in the thread.

I know this was mentioned last week and was wondering what would be involved in enabling a feature like that?

Mike

[Ted S]

Version 1.5.2 has been released to fix a small bug with the profile stats tool. This bug only impacted users with the ten-scale ratings feature enabled and an upgrade is not required if you did not use this feature.

To upgrade install the new plugin file. No changes were made to any of the other files.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by guvner

Hi Ted

We've been discussing this your mod at my forum today, and one member asked if the cell under the post with the most votes could change color to help distinguish it from other posts in the thread.

I know this was mentioned last week and was wondering what would be involved in enabling a feature like that?

Mike

Mike,

You can do this in two steps.

First go to your Helpful Answers System Settings and enable the top answer feature. This will give you acces to the top post via the variable $threadinfo[toppost]. But note, this will also add a query when a post is loaded.

Next you'll need to edit the template postbit or postbit_legacy to make use of this variable.

Depending on how you want the cell to look you'll want to modify the code appropriately.

<if condition="$threadinfo[toppost] = $post[postid]">  ... </if>

[jGas]

HI, if i try to use $helpful_answers (enabling Manual Template Placement) it simply doesn't work!
can you help me?
thanks!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jGas

HI, if i try to use $helpful_answers (enabling Manual Template Placement) it simply doesn't work!
can you help me?
thanks!

Where are you trying to place the variable?

[jGas]

after <!-- / controls -->
(inside the postbit_legacy!)
i have to do the manual placement because i have also the post thank you hack, and in the image you can see what happens if they work together with the automatic placement:


(grazie = thanks)

alternatively, is there a way to move the automatic placement AFTER the thank you button?

[SymbioteK]

ok, i guess i'm just too dumb

all installed fine, followed instructions, its all there in admin.

just not there client side.....

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

I'm not aware of a native post rating system in vBulletin...?

I was thinking of the thread rating system. nevermind.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by SymbioteK

ok, i guess i'm just too dumb

all installed fine, followed instructions, its all there in admin.

just not there client side.....

Don't be so hard on yourself!

Are you sure you've enabled it in the forum you're viewing?