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]

Did you enable the stars in your admin options?

[Razasharp]

Stars? Do you mean stats? If so yes.

They show in the default style, but not in my customised style..

Also, quick bit of feedback from my users - they really like it!

[Ted S]

Sorry.... typing from the iPhone isn't always the best.

You'll need to figure out what's been removed from your memberinfo template and get it back. It should code along the lines of $hook.

Don't have the full script around today to give you the exact syntax.

[Razasharp]

My profiles are extremely customised, if you can let me know the syntax when you are back at the office that would be great Ted

I had an idea related to this thread too, but will run it by you in the TAZ AUMod section first in case you want to run with it there instead.

[Ted S]

I've released 1.8.0 of this addon which is a small feature release.

The main purpose of this update is to introduce rollover rankings similar to what YouTube uses.

Rollover rankings can be enabled using the ratings dropdown option.

If you enable this option the template helpful_answers_roll will be used in place of helpful_answers. Please re-apply any customizations you may have made.

I have also updated the Top Helpful Answers page to include a new variable postusername as well as some hooks for other modifications.

1.9.0 will be coming next month and will include showing notifications when a post has been rated.

[Razasharp]

Nice one Ted

Was just wondering, is it possible to add an option so that we can disable the 'effect' of thumbs downs in a specific forum?

People can still rate a post down, but I don't want it affecting that users reputation or overall score (in that specific forum).

Would that be easy enough to do? Maybe I can do it by some custom edits? Thanks in advance for any help!

[Ted S]

That's easy enough. Just open up the plugin file and find the plugin hook helpfulanswers_dorate

You'll need to modify the first IF statement to skip the forum.

Something like this should work:

if ($vbulletin->options['reputationenable'] AND $vbulletin->options['helpans_rep_use'] AND $userid != $vbulletin->userinfo['userid'] AND $threadinfo['forumid] != XYZ'){

[Razasharp]

Thanks Ted, you're a star

[Ted S]

No problem. Let me know how it works.

[Razasharp]

I won't be using it for a while yet, but I'll do a test and report back...