Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Allow users to rate individual posts

Helpful Answers has been used to record over 6 MILLION times on more than 2,000 forums. If you're not using HA your users are looking for it!

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 to rate individual posts as either helpful or not allowing future visitors to understand the value of each post.

Designed to be flexible, HA has over 30 configurable settings:

• Use image or text ratings AJAX or traditional links.
• Offer yes/no or scaled 1-10 point ranking.
• Turn off negative ratings for a positive only system.
• Decide which forums are open for helpful answer ratings.
• Audit the system and identify top users and potential abusers.
• Ban specific members from using the system.
• Customize the message shown after a post is rated.
• Show a page with the top helpful posts.
• Show rating stats on a user's profile.
• Hide posts that rate "too low"
• Template driven so you can customize it all for 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 [Must Read]:

Step 1: Upload the addon files found in the upload/ folder to your forum directory
Step 2: Install the plugin through your vB Administration area
Step 3: Configure settings & enable the mod in individual forums

You must configure settings & enable forums before voting will show up.
Anonymous Stats Tracking (optional):

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. You can disable this through the admin.

Mod Philosophy -- Drive Your Own Success:

All of my mods are inspired by my work in digital marketing and are designed to drive registrations, interaction or other engagement activities the core platform does not address.

Each is designed to fit a general need by providing a starting point but it's on you to decide how to make things work to their best possible outcome. Feel free to suggest what you'd like to see next but don't wait to have what everyone else has; figure out what your forum needs and customize away.

[FractalizeR]

Anyone has the problem, that no info is shown in user profile? All settings seem to be enabled.

I've noticed a piece of strange code in member_build_blocks_start:

PHP Code:

 $templater = vB_Template::create('helpful_statsbit_ten');
 $templater = vB_Template::create('helpful_statsbit'); 


The first call seem to be redundant.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by FractalizeR

Anyone has the problem, that no info is shown in user profile? All settings seem to be enabled.

I've noticed a piece of strange code in member_build_blocks_start:

PHP Code:

 $templater = vB_Template::create('helpful_statsbit_ten');
 $templater = vB_Template::create('helpful_statsbit'); 


The first call seem to be redundant.

I'll take a look at this asap!

[Alien]

Were there any other additions/fixes yet in the latest beta, or just the new hidden posts feature at this time?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Alien

Were there any other additions/fixes yet in the latest beta, or just the new hidden posts feature at this time?

One small bug fix to address people who disable negative ratings not seeing voting options.

I will be doing a more extensive bug fix shortly.

[hotslot]

Crazy, I cannot get this simple program to work.

It's activated, However when I click Yes or No if question or answer was helpful it simply redirects me back to main page.

Can someone help me on this?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by hotslot

Crazy, I cannot get this simple program to work.

It's activated, However when I click Yes or No if question or answer was helpful it simply redirects me back to main page.

Can someone help me on this?

Do you have ajax enabled on your site? Is your browser showing any errors with javascript? Did you upload the included javascript files?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by FractalizeR

I think I'll vote for that. You see, a potential abuser can create fake login and downvote many-many threads until banned. I would like to have per-usergroup restriction. It would be also good to have this restriction dependable on the time passed since user is registered.

FYI, I totally forgot but vote limiting is already a feature of this mod.

[FractalizeR]

Per-usergroup?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by FractalizeR

Per-usergroup?

No, overall.

Would you see it being a few groups excluded or a true, per usergroup, daily limit?

[FractalizeR]

Per usergroup daily limit is better.

It's a long time since I am looking for a VBulletin mod, that will help our moderators to keep forum clean. The best system I ever saw is implemented at www.stackoverflow.com. So, if you allow I would express my personal suggestions for Helpful Answers mod. I am sure they are wanted by any moderator.

- Selected usergroups (generally admins, supermods and mods) should have a possibility to see what users and how rated selected message. This is needed to prevent system abuse by ghost account created to promote stupid threads.

- Per-group voting limit. So, for example on my forum just registered users are kept in Novice usergroup until they post 10 messages on forum. I would like them to be able to vote no more than, say, 10 votes per day. After they post 10 messages, they are moved to regular user group and their limit is now, say, 50. Regular Moderators should have 100 as a limit. And SuperMods and Admins should have no limit at all.

- Statistic on best and worst helpful users viewable by each forum member (and an ability to turn off best, worst and both having also an ability to remain active for selected usergroups. For me admins, and all mods should see that and if some NASTY extra-stupid person appears on forum, warn/ban him). May be this can be provided as a hook to VSa - Advanced Forum Statistics and/or implemented independently.

- Ability to set statuses depending on user scores like Vbulletin post statuses. For example, if user has less than 20 helpful scores, it is considered as "regular". 20-50 = "Helpful". 50-100 = "Forum Star", 100-499 = "Chief forum caretaker", 500-1000 = "junior moderator candidate" etc. This status should be shown in postbit below user messages count. When you hover status, it will tooltip score count and percentage to reach next level. All members with level more than, say, 100 are potential candidates to moderators and should be reviewed by staff.

- Moderator functions: "Remove all positive votes from this message", "Remove all negative votes from this message". This is needed when stupid people begin to downvote some useful post just to abuse one user.

- Add an ability to recount all votes and their stats (this is needed in case of some forum glitch). You can add this to usual recounters section when you, for example, rebuild forum search index.

- Scoring algorithm needs to be changed. Here are some links on simple, but effective ways to correctly calculate total scores:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...-5-star-rating
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9...e-and-examples
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...st-scored-item

This is to prevent a post with 1 10-score vote to be put higher, than a post with 100 10-score and 20 5-score votes in total rating.

- "X of Y users considered this post helpful" long text can be replaced by something like progress bar. So, I say in settings, that progress bar should be full when at least 20 users voted. So, if only 10 voted positively on this post so far, I will see 50% filled with green. If 10 users voted positively, and 10 negatively, progress bar should be at zero. If all 20 voted negatively, progress bar should be RED and at 100%.

These are just a suggestions on how this can be. Something may be changed or reworked.

P.S. I still don't see any stats in user profiles despite I enabled them on forum.