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.

[usHealthy]

this is my only problem so far and it comes to the style used on the template that see the posts likes or dislikes.

If you take a look at my forum I changed the width to my needs making it fixed template. when I go here http://www.ushealthy.com/forums/prof...?do=helpfulans

and click on the Post Name it will redirect me to that post but it change my entire template width to Fluid which it disorder my entire forum at the Wordpress page I have this forum triggered at or even the forum itself.

Please take a look at the images below



This image is after I click on Post Name Link


My question to this is how can I adjust that to be the same as the forum width?

thanks Ted

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by usHealthy

My question to this is how can I adjust that to be the same as the forum width?

I'm not entirely sure what's happening here... The top posts page merely links to your standard showthread display which, aside from the rating bit, is unaltered. How does this page look when you view it directly (click on a post #)? Without the addon?

[usHealthy]

Thanks for your answer Ted.
I followed on your suggestion and the showthread display the same width as your plugin (clicking the post #)
Now I know is nothing to do with your mod but can you please tell me how to make those changes to the showthread width please..

Thanks so much if you can and if not thanks so much too for this great mod mate.

god bless

[Simon Lloyd]

You must have changed the width of the container in the SHOWTHREAD template, if you have "auto" in there or a size greater than the width of the outside container then that can happen.

[usHealthy]

I fixed it placing a margin to it
<body style="margin:0px 300px 0px 300px" onload="self.focus()">

Thanks and God Bless

[muscleandbrawn]

Out of the blue when members click on the link from their drop down menu to a specific helpful post, they are sent to a white page that says "page not found."

Anyone know why this happens? I'd pay for a fix if anyone can repair this.

EDIT: It's actually the pretty URLs that went down. Ignore.

[Ted S]

Ignored

[aciurczak]

One of my users let me know today that the helpful answers page:

yoursite.com/forumfolder/helpfulanswers.php

Is showing posts from protected areas in the site; the queries do not seem to be taking into account user permissions in what posts they show. Is this is a known problem, or is it something that I can fix?

- Alex

[Simon Lloyd]

Hmmmm just checked, it does indeed show post titles and the helpful answer results for restricted areas but of course clicking the link takes you to the "No permissions" page, but it would be good to omit the results of forums that they are not allowed to see.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

Hmmmm just checked, it does indeed show post titles and the helpful answer results for restricted areas but of course clicking the link takes you to the "No permissions" page, but it would be good to omit the results of forums that they are not allowed to see.

Voting (and this mod) was intended as something to enhance highly visible, conversational topics rather than be site-wide.

Thus that page is a very simplistic look at what's happening around the forum and left pretty "light" by design. Every feature and check introduces a tradeoff, permissions being a big one.

This may not be ideal for all sites of course but if you have voting going on for highly protected areas, that introduces a number of other potential issues as well (like the fact that admins can see votes), you'll want to turn off that page, profile stats and of course, vote tracking.