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]

I have posted version 1.8.1 which is a small update release fixing a bug in the installer and a few erroneous HTML tags. Updating is optional.

To upgrade replace the xml file only. No changes were made to any upload files.

[mariocaz]

This version is totally compatible with 3.7.X right Ted ?? I have 3.7.6

[Ted S]

3.7.6, 3.7.5... It's all pretty much the same code. So yes you'll be fine.

[mariocaz]

Perfect, I will install it immediately!!! and hope that works great in my forum if not I will ask your awesome help Ted.

[mariocaz]

One little thing, I downloaded the 1.8.2 version but in the ACP say that I installed 1.8.1

[Ted S]

Don't worry about it. You have 1.8.1... I made a quick (one line) edit for 1.8.2 but didn't rename the version. When I do the next functional upgrade this will be fixed.

[mariocaz]

Perfect, also want to ask you if first I have to activate it for ALL the Forums and the put the exceptions ?? and also if I put the Forum all the subforums(categories) will be affected ?, I hope so because my forum is a little big with a lot of categories

[Ted S]

You can enable it for all, enable it for all BUT a few or just enable it for a few.

The list uses forum IDs only and not category structure.

[mariocaz]

Ok thank you for the information let me do it.

[mariocaz]

Ted,

A few things, please help me.....

What I have to do to show all the helpful posts to my users ?? is there a link or something like that ?? I don?t see it.

And the other thing is this, after install your awesome mod I see that button down there with the question of your mod.


http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/6873/buttonp.jpg

Thanx I will be waiting your great help in this.

Mario