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.

[Quantnet]

Ted,
Look at the instruction on your #2 post about Digg edit. There is no Yes|No part. It will always display the + and good rank

<if condition="$post['totalrank']">
 + $post[goodrank]
</if>

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Quantnet.org

Ted,
Look at the instruction on your #2 post about Digg edit. There is no Yes|No part. It will always display the + and good rank

<if condition="$post['totalrank']">
 + $post[goodrank]
</if>

That's correct but where you put that is what matters. You need to be sure you have not removed the voting section when you modified the code. Voting is controlled by another snippet of code which exists after the rating display.

[compuminus]

I am having an issue where a duplicate post was created (in the middle of the thread) when one of my admins just voted on the post. The really odd part is that this duplicate post has the same post ID, so I cannot delete it without deleting them both (using the ordinary menus). This is a pretty big problem if it proves to be more widespread.

I am running vB 3.8.0 with the thumbs up/down option and otherwise default settings. When I temporarily disabled this mod, the duplicate post disappeared.

[tpearl5]

Ted - what do you think about sending the user a notification (PM) when they get a good helpful rating? I found this, https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=162083 but I can't seem to get it to send pm's correctly when 'reputation' is given.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by compuminus

I am having an issue where a duplicate post was created (in the middle of the thread) when one of my admins just voted on the post. The really odd part is that this duplicate post has the same post ID, so I cannot delete it without deleting them both (using the ordinary menus). This is a pretty big problem if it proves to be more widespread.

I am running vB 3.8.0 with the thumbs up/down option and otherwise default settings. When I temporarily disabled this mod, the duplicate post disappeared.

Very strange indeed. Which version of the mod are you running and have you upgraded? Also is this a single incident as far as you know?

If you can send me the url to the thread.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Ted - what do you think about sending the user a notification (PM) when they get a good helpful rating? I found this, https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=162083 but I can't seem to get it to send pm's correctly when 'reputation' is given.

Could be done fairly easily but it's a lot of PMs potentially going out...

[compuminus]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Very strange indeed. Which version of the mod are you running and have you upgraded? Also is this a single incident as far as you know?

If you can send me the url to the thread.

Version 1.7.0. This is the first version I ever installed. It is the only incident, but it happened within an hour of making the mod operational, so I would expect that it could happen again. I'll PM you the thread info and link.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Could be done fairly easily but it's a lot of PMs potentially going out...

True - any ideas for notifying the user that they got a helpful answer/reputation?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

True - any ideas for notifying the user that they got a helpful answer/reputation?

I could look at making something to work with the notifications box I suppose.

[Nitro212]

How do I edit the language?