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]

Originally Posted by mariocaz

So it is only for the administrators (staff) ?

AdminCP tools are intended for admins.

[mariocaz]

Oh ok Ted, now I understand better the Mod, so this one is like the Post Thank You Mod that the users will see if the post is helpful or not entering to the thread and see which ones there are helpful, right ?

[Trana]

Can someone please tell me where I can edit the hardcoded icon sizes and the <br> in front of the template? I did the manual template edit in my postbit_legacy and replaced the icons but the size is still set somewhere. I see the codes in the helpfulanswer_roll template but even after editing it nothing is changing.

Can someone help me find what I need to change?

Thanks!

[Ted S]

The size is in the plugin code. Remove the variable and add your own img tags.

[Trana]

Is the helpfulanswers.php where I can view the stats and best posts? When I open that page I just get a blank white page.

[Trana]

Originally Posted by Ted S

The size is in the plugin code. Remove the variable and add your own img tags.

Cool, thanks for that! Also, where is the <br> just at the beginning of the template? When I insert it manually it drops down a line and I want it all on the same line with the post number and the inline checkbox.

Thanks.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Trana

Is the helpfulanswers.php where I can view the stats and best posts? When I open that page I just get a blank white page.

Have you enabled the page from your admincp?

[Ted S]

1.8.3 Has been released.

This is a small bug fix which addresses two issues:
- Fixes problems with the reputation module not working
- Fixes problems with disabling negative voting and using different rating styles

To update just upload the xml file to your Admin CP. No changes have been made to script files.

[Ted S]

Version 1.8.4 has been released which fixes an SQL bug. This bug was introduced in 1.8.3 when I used an old version of a query. Users who did not upload helpfulanswers.php will not be impacted.

To upgrade upload helpfulanswers.php. You can update the plugin file as well to change the version number although this is not required.

[reddyink]

I would like to use this excellent mod for rating replies.

Can we integrate this mod with a point systems where users get points based on
ratings received (quality & quantity)
ratings provided

thanks -