Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Post Rating System (plus many sub-features)

Note: While this modification is updated for compatibility, I am only developing features for the 4.x version. I understand many sites continue to use 3.8 for a variety of reasons but dual developing takes time away from adding anything new. I encourage you to develop out your own change and share them back as no modification is ideal for every forum out of the box.

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 show a user's vote stats in posts
• 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.

Load & Scale:
This addon is designed to work with small to large sites and is currently being used by sites with more than 2 million posts. If you have questions about integrating with your big board please contact me.

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.

External Integration:
vB Plaza Modification - http://www.vbplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6359
vB Experience - https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=199556

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.

Updates:
- 5/13/2011 - Release of 2.0.6 minor bug fix
- 08/31/2009 - Release of 2.0.0
- 08/07/2009 - Release of 1.9.5 stable

Other Versions:
This addon will work with 3.7 but to avoid issues with different code versions please see the 3.7 version thread here.

Before you download this modification please remember this is a free tool provided as a courtesy to you and support responses are subject to the availability of the author and other members. If you are looking for a professionally supported system this is not the solution for you.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TheComputerGuy

I think it would be neat if the vote average was below a certain value it would lock the thread.

this way it would help and allow for a community to self moderate and give the power back to the people.

any feedback?

Certainly possible and not all that hard. Of course you'd want to consider how many votes are needed and you have to factor in malicious users too. If there's enough support I can add in a module to do this.

[TheComputerGuy]

I would be more than happy to buy you a nice dinner, wine, beer whatever you would like.

[James T Brock]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Thank you. Unfortunate vb 3.8 and 4 use different code, even different collapse functions so converting a seemingly simple feature takes more time than it may seem.

Yes I know that. I'm not sure why that person felt the need to post that though since nobody was complaining, I was just inquiring on an update. Personally I really dislike 4.0 and the unnecessary changes to how certain things work. To me it seems like it just made things harder to do for no reason whatsoever. The new variables are more confusing for PHP coders AND for non-coders, in my opinion.

Originally Posted by TheComputerGuy

I think it would be neat if the vote average was below a certain value it would lock the thread.

this way it would help and allow for a community to self moderate and give the power back to the people.

any feedback?

Interesting idea but it wouldn't be needed if the posts that received a certain amount of negative votes were collapsed. What if the first post was great and just SOME of the posts in the thread were really unhelpful and got a lot of negative votes, would it still be fair to have the thread locked? It's too easy to abuse.

I've heavily modified this mod on my forum to add lots of new stuff but the collapsible posts feature is the only thing I haven't figured out how to do.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by James T Brock

Yes I know that. I'm not sure why that person felt the need to post that though since nobody was complaining, I was just inquiring on an update. Personally I really dislike 4.0 and the unnecessary changes to how certain things work. To me it seems like it just made things harder to do for no reason whatsoever. The new variables are more confusing for PHP coders AND for non-coders, in my opinion.

I'm traveling all week but will get this done asap. Hopefully next weekend. And of course documented in a way that you can include it without having to upgrade... The collapse feature is a new bit of code but overall its looking like just 2 new templates, one or two if statements and some variables.

[kmohamed]

Originally Posted by TheComputerGuy

I would be more than happy to buy you a nice dinner, wine, beer whatever you would like.

lol
James T Brock ... i just wanted to thank the coder for his excellent work. speaking on behave the others who feel the same way

[jl255]

i tried to use the manual insert into template, but it always makes a line-break before putting in the text in the postbit. is there a way i can make the text in-line with the existing buttons in postbit?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jl255

i tried to use the manual insert into template, but it always makes a line-break before putting in the text in the postbit. is there a way i can make the text in-line with the existing buttons in postbit?

You would need to wrap the variable in a css aligned DIV or use a table.

[jl255]

Originally Posted by Ted S

You would need to wrap the variable in a css aligned DIV or use a table.

awesome, tks for the quick tip. wonder if you can give me a quick tip on what i need to include for the css part in order to prevent the line-break?

[jl255]

on another question, is it possible to display a list of all a particular member's posts that got rated?
tks!

[RobbieZ]

Ive noticed that the XML call for the images of 'Arrows with rollover' actually links to the thumbs image.