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]

Originally Posted by Razasharp

Hi Ted

I finally got around to installing this on my 3.7 board.

Just a quickie, is it possible to simply change the rating system so that all it shows is the thumbs up/down buttons, along with the number of thumbs ups or downs the post has had next to them?

At the mo it takes up too much space and all that text is not needed as most people know thumbs rating systems these days. If I can do this via template edits - great! Just let me know which templates I need to change

Thanks for a cool plug-in!

Just edit the helpful_answer template as you see fit!

[Razasharp]

Thanks Ted. I've edited it but it's not quite working how I want.

All I want is the thumbs up/down buttons to show, with the current number/rating for each either side of the button. Then if a user rates a post, his rating is appended via ajax and the buttons stop being links (so they know they've rated). Maybe even have an alternative set of buttons to show when they've rated (maybe with a dot or alt text so we can show how they rated themselves).

At the mo, when they rate it says 'thanks' but takes all my other buttons in the td along with it (not ideal as they may want to report a post too, after giving it neg rating).

Anyway to simplify it so it works like this? Or are there more templates I could edit?

[Ted S]

You can accomplish all of this with the template you're using now. Just be sure to use the different variables for showing and not showing ranks. You'll also need to manually add the links and images for the thumbs rather than relying on the script to put those in for you.

Let me know if you get stuck...

[Razasharp]

Hi Ted

I can get as far as showing the static images after they've voted, along with the current score - but can I tell them which one they voted too? (in the alt text will be fine).

Also, when they vote it still clears the area with the 'thanks message anyway I can get it to say thanks, but then go back to how it was?

Shall I make my current changes live so you can take a look?

[Razasharp]

Hey Ted - got it

Will let you know how we get on with it - stats sending is on. Would be cool if you could share the results with us too?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Razasharp

Hi Ted

I can get as far as showing the static images after they've voted, along with the current score - but can I tell them which one they voted too? (in the alt text will be fine).

Also, when they vote it still clears the area with the 'thanks message anyway I can get it to say thanks, but then go back to how it was?

Shall I make my current changes live so you can take a look?

All you would need to tell them is to have a second set of images to show (i.e. a clear image).

You can use the $helpful should be set to 1 if they voted yes and 0 for no.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Razasharp

Hey Ted - got it

Will let you know how we get on with it - stats sending is on. Would be cool if you could share the results with us too?

I've been waiting until we pass the 25k vote mark at which point I'll be sharing some stat trends (obviously without any site data). I do need to filter out a few things as some sites don't use the system the same way and impact the overall scores...

One tidbit based on the 20k or so votes so far... 75% of posts are given positive rankings. Not bad!

[Razasharp]

I'd be interested to see them! I haven't added the profile bits to my style yet - but I think that will be interesting too.

Can we see who rated a post? (in case of abuse)

Originally Posted by Ted S

All you would need to tell them is to have a second set of images to show (i.e. a clear image).

You can use the $helpful should be set to 1 if they voted yes and 0 for no.

How do you mean Ted?

Edit:
Hey Ted, how do I get the $blocks[helpful_statsbit] to display in my customised profile? :-/

[Ted S]

Can we see who rated a post? (in case of abuse)

Yes. There's an extensive log tool in the admin that lets you view ratings by user and remove them if you so chose.

Hey Ted, how do I get the $blocks[helpful_statsbit] to display in my customised profile?

That's another template... helpful_statsbit or helpful_statsbit_ten if you use the 10 point scale.

[Razasharp]

It doesn't work tho?

I put $helpful_statsbit in my memberinfo template and nothing shows for it :-/