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.

[vbuser99]

Originally Posted by Ted S

The variable $post[totalrank] should have your total ranks if you're using just positive rankings. If it's only showing one double check that there's a higher value in the actual table (you can do this through phpmyadmin or with the query:" select totalrank from post where postid = X; ").

No, its not working that way. It is only showing that post's totalrank. I need user's total rank info.

I guess I couldn't describe what I actually want to do.
I would like to display user's helpful answers statistics in postbit like his reputation or age info.
I would like to have his how may total helpful answers he got in the whole forum, not just on that thread or just on that post.
By having helpful answers stats in postbit, I believe this will encourage users to post more helpful posts.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by vbuser99

No, its not working that way. It is only showing that post's totalrank. I need user's total rank info.

I guess I couldn't describe what I actually want to do.
I would like to display user's helpful answers statistics in postbit like his reputation or age info.
I would like to have his how may total helpful answers he got in the whole forum, not just on that thread or just on that post.
By having helpful answers stats in postbit, I believe this will encourage users to post more helpful posts.

Got it. And you're right, there is no variable for that.

Right now that data is not computed in aggregate for a user which means to pull it up for each post you would need another query (10 posts per page means 10 queries). It is of course possible to keep a tally for the user which would avoid the query it just isn't something people have asked for previously.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by maidos

well just have the same feature as digg. yoour mod has functionality that is similar with digg. But yeah some members prefer pictures over texts so i was wondering if you could implement a positive and negative icons instead? let user to see example the votes like +6 diggs +6 / -0

I think pictures are great and much more compelling than words but am not a graphic artist. If someone would like to contribute an icon set for public use I'll make it work.

[vbuser99]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Got it. And you're right, there is no variable for that.

Right now that data is not computed in aggregate for a user which means to pull it up for each post you would need another query (10 posts per page means 10 queries). It is of course possible to keep a tally for the user which would avoid the query it just isn't something people have asked for previously.

I figured so, actually it may be a little bit costy too with current mod design, as you are not updating that info in a field in user table (that would be afficient).

I needed this info:

SELECT b.userid, count( * )
FROM `helpfulanswer` a, post b
WHERE yesno >0 and a.postid = b.postid
GROUP BY b.userid
HAVING count( * ) >0

OR with usernames

SELECT c.username, count( * )
FROM `helpfulanswer` a, post b, user c
WHERE yesno >0 and a.postid = b.postid and b.userid=c.userid
GROUP BY b.userid
HAVING count( * ) >0

[Ted S]

I'd suggest just adding a little hook to update the counts to the user's profile as threads get rated. There's already plugins included in the script so you don't have to worry about future upgrading... helpfulanswers_dorate would be a good place to start with.

[lazyseller]

Originally Posted by Ted S

That's not something covered but a great idea...

Try this version of the addon which offers this as an option.

Thanks for the update

I think theres an issue with the xml file...

[gmerin]

I get "XML Error: Empty document at Line 1" when I try to import the newest product file

you have an extra gravetick at the beginning of line 1

imports ok if you remove the gravetick

[gmerin]

nevermind. found it. helpfulanswers.php was in the wrong dir. works now.

[maidos]

cool, but dont have photoshop but i do like the picture from a mod, has the same feature as digg but the mod is declared dead

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...light=postrate

maybe you could use those thumbs icons

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by maidos

cool, but dont have photoshop but i do like the picture from a mod, has the same feature as digg but the mod is declared dead

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...light=postrate

maybe you could use those thumbs icons

Unfortunately I can't use icons unless the author specifically grants me the right to distribute them.