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 Quantnet.org

suggestion:
Instead of manually enable forum by forum, consider having the options in setting control to enable a group of forums.
for example:
Enable (Forum ID) : 1,3,4,5
Disable: 2,6,8

I'm not sure that's any more effective. Many sites have 50 or 100 or more forums and getting all their ids would not be fun. perhaps a bulk upload tool would make more sense.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

can you explain this a bit more?

Sure

• Add option to allow this hack to also contribute to the user's reputation. (without comments) This way the user gets credit for posting the thread/post.
• Add option to contribute to thread rating. "yes" is a 5, "no" is a 1. Thread rating is redundant with this hack, no?
• Include setting for vbplaza to add points to user when they get a good rating, and subtract when they get a bad rating. (this will be done through reputation if that option is added)

[Ted S]

Version 1.3.4 has been releases which addresses several minor bugs and adds functionality. Here's a complete list of the changes:

- Bug Fix: Templates 'helpful_answers_top' and 'helpful_answers_top_bit' are now cached.
- Bug Fix: English text in topanswers routine now uses phrases
- Bug Fix: Users may not rate their own posts (see new feature)
- New template: 'helpful_answers_error' is used to show ajax errors
- New feature: Admins may require a minimum number of posts before a user can rate posts
- New feature: Admins may now enable self rating to let users rate their own posts
- New feature: User related errors now print back to ajax users (allows user to understand issue)

Updating is recommended but not required.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

[*]Add option to allow this hack to also contribute to the user's reputation. (without comments) This way the user gets credit for posting the thread/post.

How about a positive point (or points, you'd set the scale) for each vote they get [negative for a negative vote].

Originally Posted by tpearl5

[*]Add option to contribute to thread rating. "yes" is a 5, "no" is a 1. Thread rating is redundant with this hack, no?

I'm not sure the post should impact the thread rating... you could have a great post with a few bad ratings. We could however do a new column: average post and show the ratings of those?

Originally Posted by tpearl5

[*]Include setting for vbplaza to add points to user when they get a good rating, and subtract when they get a bad rating. (this will be done through reputation if that option is added)

I'm not familiar with this system; is this AND the rep both needed?

[guvner]

For my tech support forum this is ideal - many thanks Ted!

I'm testing this at the moment in a private forum - just one small problem though, I can't get the "Did you find this post helpful? Yes | No" box to show up when using the standard postbit template yet it shows just fine with postbit legacy.

In my case, my primary style is uses the standard postbit and I also offer a child style of the primary which uses the postbit legacy template as the default.

I can confirm that the template hook $template_hook[postbit_controls] appears in both templates.

To troubleshoot this, I next added the template code $helpful_answers to the default VB templates and the same thing happened - it showed up when the legacy template is used but not with the standard postbit template.

Any ideas?

[Ted S]

I just tried this myself; Try placing the variable before "<!-- message, attachments, sig -->".

If that doesn't work let me know.

[guvner]

Nope, sorry - same result - this is very puzzling - can't think of a logical reason for it.

[Ted S]

Interesting. Can you think of any Addons which may impact the postbit template? If you view source do you see the <hr ...> tag?

[guvner]

yes - just after the title as per:

			<!-- icon and title -->
			<div class="smallfont">
				
				<strong>Re: It's really starting to get annoying...</strong>
			</div>
			<hr size="1" style="color:#D1D1E1; background-color:#D1D1E1" />
			<!-- / icon and title -->

I considered another hack being involved - but why would my stock VB templates be affected the same in the same way?

Should I post my posbit template code here?

[Ted S]

Well that's good progress. It doesn't sound like another addon conflict as the script is making it to rendering.

It looks like there's no vote to show and for some reason no rights for you to vote on that post. Are you sure the addon is (1) enabled for the forum with the postbit style and (2) not your own post?