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

[Storyteller69]

Originally Posted by kontagio.us

even with compatibility mode on i have no problems. i only use 2 bars though

Hmm, with Compatibility mode on and two bars I have still the problem.

@michelle86
Is it possible that the 400+ are the points per day? Standrad is 2 points per day - so 200+ days x2=400+ points.
And for the requirement do you set the needed points and not the days? Allso here days x2.

Storyteller

[Phalynx]

Originally Posted by jretzer

Installed. Nice. Is there a way to have a button on posts to allow users to "like" or "dislike" a post, which then would add or subtract points from their Experience?

Originally Posted by jretzer

Can someone tell me how to integrate VB experience with Helpful Answers. I have installed both, and checked the option for enable reputation addon with Helpful ... is there something else I need to do so that the ups and downs are reflected in Experience?

TIA

Did you installed also the Helpful Answers <-> vBExperience plugin

Originally Posted by RollaJedi

I'd like to make a request for an addon to the mod called gXboxlive so we can make achievements from the gamerscore numbers, please.

Its here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...19#post2086619

I use this mod and it works great

Added to todolist.

Originally Posted by jretzer

Is there a way to link user titles to the experience points? TIA

Of course, you would need to edit some templates...

Originally Posted by kontagio.us

Okay I got the achievements working with the new instructions but the awards in rich username still dont show up. i tried all 3 settings (before, after and none) and it still doesnt seem to work. can you please give me the code for the award and I will add it to the template manually. thanks for the great support this is one of the best mods out there (and can you tell me which template its in)

Seems the awards behind username does not work correctly. Will fix this soon.

[SEW810]

hummmm, I see.
Thanx you kontagio.us and storyteller69

I'll see what happend next upgrade

Windows vista (Home bascic and bussines), IE8,compativility view (ond and off)= misplaced images

[Lazorbeam]

This addon rocks. Thank you so much for your work, Marius. Installed and donated.

I'm having a couple problems though. The achievements postbit is showing "New Achievement! New Achievement!". How do I remove the duplicate?

My second problem should be pretty simple to solve. Under the experience -> Insight experience tab, on the right side, the "featured" window has white boxes. Thanks to the style I'm using, I would like this to be black. I imagine I just need to change a color code somewhere. I have a similar issue with the statistics tab.

See attached pictures.

Thanks again!

[Phalynx]

Originally Posted by Lazorbeam

This addon rocks. Thank you so much for your work, Marius. Installed and donated.

I'm having a couple problems though. The achievements postbit is showing "New Achievement! New Achievement!". How do I remove the duplicate?

It seems you have an achievement without an image. Please check the settings for this "New Achievement!"-Achievement.

Originally Posted by Lazorbeam

My second problem should be pretty simple to solve. Under the experience -> Insight experience tab, on the right side, the "featured" window has white boxes. Thanks to the style I'm using, I would like this to be black. I imagine I just need to change a color code somewhere. I have a similar issue with the statistics tab.

See attached pictures.

Thanks again!

I'm using here the CSS from the social groups and album. Please check if these contain also white areas.

[dvg323]

Quick question, I misread the "Advanced Forum Stats" plugin as something that would make it possible to have achievements for something like "Make 20 posts in the Off Topic forum" instead of it being a system that could award 2 points for every post but 5 for Off Topic (for example).

Is there a plugin or an option in vBExperience that supports what I originally thought the AFS was for? (Make ## posts in {name of forum}.)

[Phalynx]

Please click "Mark as Installed" to get further support.

Such an addon is in work.

[Lazorbeam]

Thank you Phalynx. I found 2 achievements named "New Achievement". Deleted them, but no other achievements were showing, although I do have the 100 pts achievement. I had to do recounts for them to show again.

I did encounter a new error. When recounting, the following error came up when trying to update experience points:

Database error in vBulletin 4.0.6:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT
COUNT(*) AS count_threads,
SUM(votetotal/votenum) AS count_votes,
SUM(replycount) AS count_replycount,
SUM(views) AS count_views,
SUM(sticky) AS count_stickies
FROM thread
WHERE visible=1 AND forumid NOT IN(Off-Topic,Off Topic)
AND postuserid=1;

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'Topic)
AND postuserid=1' at line 8
Error Number : 1064
Request Date : Wednesday, August 25th 2010 @ 01:31:52 PM
Error Date : Wednesday, August 25th 2010 @ 01:31:53 PM
Script : http://***/admincp/xperience_admin.p...min_recount_xp
Referrer : http://***/admincp/xperience_admin.php?do=recount
IP Address : ***
Username : Alaera
Classname : vB_Database_MySQLi
MySQL Version : 5.0.91-community

Experience points don't seem to be updating. The default parameters to recount experience do not work (Number of users to process per cycle = 150, User ID to start at = 1). But at 150/5 the error doesn't pop up.

Concerning the social groups and album CSS files... I can't find them. Any idea where they are, or what specifically they are called?

[S]EDIT: Fixed my own error. I didn't have an Off Topic forum. If you specify an invalid or non-existing forum in "ignore this forum for points", experience will not be counted anywhere.[/S]

EDIT2: Use forum IDs, not forum names in "ignore these forums".

[dvg323]

Originally Posted by Phalynx

Please click "Mark as Installed" to get further support.

Such an addon is in work.

Ah, my apologies. I was testing out all sorts of add-ons and haven't yet gone through and ticked the ones I am sticking with for sure. I like vBE so far, I'm definitely keeping it!

Not to sound, well, impatient, but do you have perhaps a timeframe when this new update may be released? I'm excited!

And, thanks for your hard work thus far! I'm loving the mod so far, it does everything exactly the way I had hoped for minus that little blip of me not reading the description correctly! XD

[Phalynx]

I'm already on it, I think it can be released next week.