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.

[Simon Lloyd]

In helpfulanswers_settings (admincp) turn this off:
Show Users Who Voted On Their Post
If enabled, users will see who voted on their post in the notifications area.
Yes No

[furnival]

I appreciate you taking the time to reply but I knew that much. What I said was it would be useful for me to be able to make positive ratings named and negative feedback anonymous but it's no big deal I can live without it.

On a different note... Some of my users are asking how the time period for the max post ratings a user can make per day is calculated. Is it on a rolling 24 hour period, please? I couldn't see how this is done in the code.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by furnival

I appreciate you taking the time to reply but I knew that much. What I said was it would be useful for me to be able to make positive ratings named and negative feedback anonymous but it's no big deal I can live without it.


On a different note... Some of my users are asking how the time period for the max post ratings a user can make per day is calculated. Is it on a rolling 24 hour period, please? I couldn't see how this is done in the code.

There's a small admin panel that may do what you want in the user cp. It's nothing fancy.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by furnival

On a different note... Some of my users are asking how the time period for the max post ratings a user can make per day is calculated. Is it on a rolling 24 hour period, please? I couldn't see how this is done in the code.

It's rolling from the time of the last vote.

Line 323 of helpfulanswers.php should you wish to adjust

$datecut = TIMENOW - 86400;
$helpfulanswer = $db->query_first_slave("
   SELECT COUNT(helpfulanswerid) as count FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulanswer
   WHERE userid = $safeuserid AND dateline > $datecut
  ");

To change to days something like this will work:

$helpfulanswer = $db->query_first_slave("
   SELECT COUNT(helpfulanswerid) as count FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulanswer
   WHERE userid = $safeuserid AND (TO_DAYS(dateline) > TO_DAYS(TIMENOW))
  ");

[furnival]

Thanks Ted! I really appreciate your time on this.

On a different note, I was using 2.0.5 but I just upgraded to 2.0.6. It seems it wasn't updating the counter on the "user" table. I'm going to try building this using SQL queries (because I'm planning on using users' helpful post count to control whether they get admitted to a restricted forum, which is an add on modification somebody is going to develop for me.)
I'll post the SQL queries I used if I get it working.

I hope this post makes sense.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by furnival

Thanks Ted! I really appreciate your time on this.

On a different note, I was using 2.0.5 but I just upgraded to 2.0.6. It seems it wasn't updating the counter on the "user" table. I'm going to try building this using SQL queries (because I'm planning on using users' helpful post count to control whether they get admitted to a restricted forum, which is an add on modification somebody is going to develop for me.)
I'll post the SQL queries I used if I get it working.

I hope this post makes sense.

It's very simple to plug a new query into the update process...

Open up helpfulanswers.php and go to line 344

$db->query_write("
  INSERT INTO " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulanswer
  SET postid = $postinfo[postid], userid = $safeuserid, yesno = '$saferank', dateline = ". TIMENOW ."
 ");

You'll see the user query a few lines lower which is a conditional query meaning that it does a few checks for variables before it runs [there does seem to be a bug as the two if statements are the same].

You can modify that query to add to the user table or just copy it and make it alter another table. field = field+1 to increment a counter.

[furnival]

Excellent, many thanks Ted I used that code.

Regarding the post you made before about how the no. of posts rated in a 24 hour period works..... I might be pushing my luck here, but this will be my last request I promise: it would be useful for me to exclude users in certain usergroups from the limit on the number of posts they can rate in 24 hours (so that moderators can rate an unlimited number of posts as helpful). Is there an addition I could make to the code around line 323 to achieve that, please?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by furnival

Excellent, many thanks Ted I used that code.

Regarding the post you made before about how the no. of posts rated in a 24 hour period works..... I might be pushing my luck here, but this will be my last request I promise: it would be useful for me to exclude users in certain usergroups from the limit on the number of posts they can rate in 24 hours (so that moderators can rate an unlimited number of posts as helpful). Is there an addition I could make to the code around line 323 to achieve that, please?

No need to stop anywhere... the idea of my mods is to extend them so asking how to do so is perfectly reasonable...

And yes, you can do this. If you just exclude groups from the function it's very simple...

Find

$datecut = TIMENOW - 86400;
  $helpfulanswer = $db->query_first_slave("
   SELECT COUNT(helpfulanswerid) as count FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulanswer
   WHERE userid = $safeuserid AND dateline > $datecut
  ");
  $count = $helpfulanswer['count'];

Change to something like...

$datecut = TIMENOW - 86400;
  if(!is_member_of($bbuserinfo, 1,2,3)){
   $datecheck = "AND dateline > ". $datecut;
  } else { $datecheck = ''; }
  
  $helpfulanswer = $db->query_first_slave("
   SELECT COUNT(helpfulanswerid) as count FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulanswer
   WHERE userid = $safeuserid $datecheck
  ");
  $count = $helpfulanswer['count'];

Where x,y,z are groups to exclude.

[furnival]

Oh dear, I can't seem to get that code to work.
On edit: a programmer helped me out with the above tweak to allow moderators to rate an unlimited number of posts; he said he'll post the code here at the weekend.

[Wonksta]

I don't know if this has been asked before but I am a little concerned.

If the Reputation feature is enabled with this Mod and someone is on a Reputation Spread before repping the same person, can they get around to having to wait for the Rep Spread by just randomly pressing the thumbs up on a bunch of posts and then being able to rep the same person via the inbuilt vBulletin rep system because they spread Reps via this Mod?

Reason I ask is I am worried this will cause a lot of rep whoring if enabled...