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

[RollaJedi]

Originally Posted by Jimbolosey

I'm wondering about creating custom conditions for my Awards and Achievements. Suppose I want users to be able to get an award for winning a gaming tournament (like in CoD4 or something). I want to choose "Custom" from the conditions panel. However, "Custom" doesn't mean anything...

How would I go about doing this? Like, give them an award if they have a topic taht's been viewed 500+ times? etc. Stuff like that.

Originally Posted by Sw0rDz

Where would I start if I wanted to make a custom achievement based of a custom condition. For example, I have a shop mod installed. I want to program a custom achievement that happens when a person owns 10 or so items. I really just want to code something in php, that either returns a value, and then use this value for the custom condition. I haven't really seen anything for this in the CDP.

P, I think a lot of us are confused about this. We don't really know what you mean by look in the cdp addon and such because there isnt really any guide telling you step by step what you should be looking for and what you need to be doing to create your own custom conditions. I'd love to use it, but without more guidance its really just a blur to me.

[Phalynx]

Originally Posted by RollaJedi

P, I think a lot of us are confused about this. We don't really know what you mean by look in the cdp addon and such because there isnt really any guide telling you step by step what you should be looking for and what you need to be doing to create your own custom conditions. I'd love to use it, but without more guidance its really just a blur to me.

I never said using the CDP is easy. vBExperience offers a programmatically usable interface for such things. But there is currently no solution that is useable for users without the knowlegde of PHP and SQL Statements. It seems complex, but not for a programmer.
The time is the limiting factor. If I would have more time I could extend this by implementing an interface for users without programming something.

[Charis]

Thanks for the great mod!

I 've an issue after I upgraded to vbulletin 4.06 and Experience 4.02.
As you can see at the following picture, The total activity is up to 999%!



What am I doing wrong?

[Phalynx]

Originally Posted by Charis

Thanks for the great mod!

I 've an issue after I upgraded to vbulletin 4.06 and Experience 4.02.
As you can see at the following picture, The total activity is up to 999%!



What am I doing wrong?

Are you using a decimal seperator? It seems it is missing, so that 99,9 (or 99.9) results in 999.

[Charis]

No, mea culpa.
Thanks again.

[Phalynx]

TheMayhem and me opened a support site for our FREE products. Please visit us at vBaddict.net!
vBAddict.net will help us to keep an open eye of all your wishes, bug reports and improvements. It's an addon to vBulletin.org, where we can call it our new home.
We will still giving support here, vBulletin.org is a site which we will support.

The site will be also our main showcase. So you can expect to see all of our supported products over there in action.

If you want to support us visit us:
http://www.vbaddict.net

The registration is free, as our software is.

[papabear99]

We were having some issues on our system (latest vbulletin) and a few mods. Specifically the vBadvanced Links product. I finally threw my hands up and put in a support ticket and it seems as if they are saying that the Experience Code is causing some problems. The exact response is below. Are there any lnown issues relating to this or do we have a deeper problem? TKS for the assistance

Ticket Response Quote:

> Hello,
> I've just taken a look at things for you, but I was able to submit a link
> as a regular member and then approve it with the admin account just fine.
> I did notice that your 'Moderation' and 'Search' links are missing from
> the links navbar though, so I'm guessing you just haven't been able to see
> the links awaiting moderation since there were a couple of others in
> there. It seems that the reason the links were not showing has something
> to do with the "vBExperience" product you have installed. When that
> product is enabled, it's somehow causing the 'process_templates_complete'
> vB plugin to be executed much sooner than it should, and before the
> variables to determine if the Search and Moderate links should be shown.
> I'm not sure what vBExperience is doing to cause the plugins to be
> executed out of order like that, but there's a good chance that's causing
> other issues as well.

[micheal332001]

Originally Posted by Phalynx

Fixed in 4.0.3
Yes, it is right.

Which MySQL Version are you using?

Im using version 4.1.22 and vBulletin Version 4.0.0or does this not work with vb 4.0.0

[Charis]

I 've one more issue.

I can 't see awards in profile and next to username.
I' ve recalculate awards and also I gave some awards manually.
At the tab "Awards" (.../xperience.php?go=awards) I can see some awards given to users.
---
My forum has been turned off for several months (since February).
vBulletin 4.0.6 - vBExperience 4.0.2
Settings:
Use the award system? = "Yes"
Use Awards in rich username? = "Username Awards"

[kontagio.us]

Originally Posted by Charis

I 've one more issue.

I can 't see awards in profile and next to username.
I' ve recalculate awards and also I gave some awards manually.
At the tab "Awards" (.../xperience.php?go=awards) I can see some awards given to users.
---
My forum has been turned off for several months (since February).
vBulletin 4.0.6 - vBExperience 4.0.2
Settings:
Use the award system? = "Yes"
Use Awards in rich username? = "Username Awards"

Originally Posted by Phalynx

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

I hope he fixes it.