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.

[Sworm]

Hi, great Hack!

There's some knowed issue if used with Post Thank You Hack?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by BehG

Hi Ted,

We installed this hack and it wasn't what we were looking for, so we removed it. However, since then (actually even after we disabled the product and before we removed it), all our regular Vbulletin polls are getting redirected to other threads (either upong voting or through the edit poll function by MODS).

I'm just wondering if there's any part of this hack which would have modified the poll.php file or any of its functions to cause this problem . We did not have this issue before. Your help would be greatly appreciated as we're getting a lot of grif from our members now.

Sorry to hear the addon wasn't right for you however there is nothing that should impact polls with this addon. Due to the method used for plugins once you removed the addon all code related to other files was removed from plugin locations.

I would suggest uploading the poll.php file again and testing a new poll to see what is incorrectly linking. If you want to PM me I may be able to try and help you run down the issue.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Sworm

Hi, great Hack!

There's some knowed issue if used with Post Thank You Hack?

There are no known conflicts that prevent either addon from working however because both addons use the same template hook there have been style complaints. If you dislike the style appearance you can get around this by enabling the manual template placement option with this addon and placing a variable in your postbit template where you want the ratings to show.

[Simon Lloyd]

I use the post thank you hack too and have no issues whatsoever, im using 3.8.2

[HighRollerX]

Where can I get that button set? I like them...lol.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by HighRollerX

Where can I get that button set? I like them...lol.

The icons (thumbs) come included in the zip archive.

[Strike3ForumsMH]

Hi Ted,

Sorry if this has been covered before but I ran into this error:

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.2:

Invalid SQL:
        INSERT INTO helpfulanswer
        SET postid = 449290, userid = 4, yesno = '1', dateline = 1241158596, userid = 36;

MySQL Error   : Column 'userid' specified twice
Error Number  : 1110
Request Date  : Friday, May 1st 2009 @ 02:16:36 AM
Error Date    : Friday, May 1st 2009 @ 02:16:36 AM
Script        : xxxxx/helpfulanswers.php
Referrer      : xxxxx
IP Address    : xxxxx
Username      : xxxxxxx
Classname     : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.67-community

Did I miss something or is it due to being on 3.8x? Sorry again if this has been covered.

Thanks.

- Reid

[Ted S]

Yikes. Looks like a bug in the code... I'm away from my main computer for a few days but will try to post a fix asap.

[Ted S]

1.8.2 has been released to fix a small bug in 1.8.1. Users with 1.8.1 should upgrade by uploading the file helpfulanswers.php. Users on earlier versions do not need to upgrade.

[Sworm]

Hi Ted, good work.

Last question before install....
I don't have seen the layout of the 10 point rank system....
This mode, is like the hack used in the vbseo.com forum , under the staff posts? "Have i helped you? Please rate my support"

In that forum, if anybody go to click on the link "Please Rate my support" , is showed a loading image that open a new part with the default vbulletin stars rating for the votes.....
Attachment 98619

Attachment 98620

Can i know if is the same hack or if there's some differences?

Thanks