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.

[tpearl5]

Yeh, my next question was going to be if that would add a lot of queries. If you could do it without adding a lot of overhead that would be awesome.

[Ted S]

It's not planned in the addon now but you certainly could extend things to update as I mentioned above.

[cellarius]

Hi Ted,

thanks for your work.

There might be a bug in the product file, tho: I tried to install, but the script threw a mysql error at me, saying there was no field "helpfulanswerid" in the fieldset of table "helpfulpost".
I checked and found that there had been no tables installed into my database and thought: Well, of course, there's no field if the tables did not get installed. So I looked at your product file and took out the mysql-CREATEs and created the tables in phpmyadmin.
I tried to install again, and yet again the script threw the same error at me, tho I was pretty sure the tables were created as they were supposed to be. Indeed, there was no such field in helpfulpost. After a closer look at your script, I was pretty sure that the line

SELECT COUNT(helpfulanswerid) as count FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulpost

was supposed to read

SELECT COUNT(helpfulanswerid) as count FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulanswer

i.e., the query was going to the wrong table. After changing this, I had no further problems installing, and the mod works just fine (at least, I did not find any errors up to now).

Another question concerning phrase helpfulanswer_postshavebeen. It reads "{1}'s Posts have been rated good {2} out of {3} times</span>". Is that </span>-Tag really supposed to be there?

Then I did a little modification to the helpful_answers_roll-Template. I was somewhat disappointed that there was no way to have icons when I want to allow only positive ratings (or did I miss something?). So I set the options to "Images - Thumbs with rollover" anyway and changed the template code as follows:

Find:

                    <if condition="$show['rate_helpfulanswer']">
                        <strong>$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_didyoufind] <a href="./helpfulanswers.php?do=rate&postid=$post[postid]&rank=1">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_yesidid]</a></strong>
                    </if>

Replace with:

                    <if condition="$show['rate_helpfulanswer']">
                        $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_didyoufind] <a href="./helpfulanswers.php?do=rate&postid=$post[postid]&rank=1" <if condition="$vboptions[disable_ajax] != 2"> onclick="return helpfulanswers_rate($post[postid], 1);" </if> rel="nofollow" onmouseover="document.post_$post[postid]_up.src='images/buttons/ha_thumbsup.gif';" onmouseout="document.post_$post[postid]_up.src='images/buttons/ha_thumbsup_gray.gif';"><img name="post_$post[postid]_up" src="images/buttons/ha_thumbsup_gray.gif" width="11" height="20" border="0" alt="$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_yes]" align="absmiddle" /></a>

                    <if condition="$show['guest'] AND $vboptions['helpans_guestshow']">
                       $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_didyoufind]
                        <a href="./helpfulanswers.php?do=guestrate" <if condition="$vboptions[disable_ajax] != 2"> onclick="return helpfulanswers_rate($post[postid], 1);" </if> rel="nofollow" onmouseover="document.post_$post[postid]_up.src='images/buttons/ha_plus.png';" onmouseout="document.post_$post[postid]_up.src='images/buttons/ha_plus_gray.png';"><img name="post_$post[postid]_up" src="images/buttons/ha_plus_gray.png" width="20" height="20" border="0" alt="$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_yes]" align="absmiddle" /></a>
                    </if>

It will also show the green thumbsup for posts the user has already rated.

[Ted S]

Thanks for your two comments. I'm posting an updated verison to fix the install bug.

I'll look at the span tag later this evening.

[cellarius]

Hope you won't stone me, but in the template I edited, it seems to me that several <strong>-Tags are opened but never closed. Same in other templates. Not sure if I'm overlooking something.

Lines 131, 203, 222, 256, 262 in the .xml-file.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by cellarius

Hope you won't stone me, but in the template I edited, it seems to me that several <strong>-Tags are opened but never closed. Same in other templates. Not sure if I'm overlooking something.

Lines 131, 203, 222, 256, 262 in the .xml-file.

Too many edits without doing a rebuild. These will be fixed in 1.8.1

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by cellarius

Hi Ted,

I was somewhat disappointed that there was no way to have icons when I want to allow only positive ratings (or did I miss something?). So I set the options to "Images - Thumbs with rollover" anyway and changed the template code as follows:

As you discovered there isn't an option to do thumbs up only by removing the thumbs down icon will get you pretty close.

To date no one else has requested this.

[Ted S]

I have posted version 1.8.1 which is a small update release fixing a bug in the installer and a few erroneous HTML tags. Updating is optional.

To upgrade replace the xml file only. No changes were made to any upload files.

[BehG]

Hi Ted,

We installed this hack and it wasn't what we were looking for, so we removed it. However, since then (actually even after we disabled the product and before we removed it), all our regular Vbulletin polls are getting redirected to other threads (either upong voting or through the edit poll function by MODS).

I'm just wondering if there's any part of this hack which would have modified the poll.php file or any of its functions to cause this problem . We did not have this issue before. Your help would be greatly appreciated as we're getting a lot of grif from our members now.

[landrewolsen72]

I installed version 1.7.0 on a system running vbulletin 3.8.2 and ran into a a small problem where the admin section could not find the postid.

I am new enough to vbulletin that this error could have been pilot error on my part, but I am posting the patch here in case it is useful to anyone else.

Thanks
-Andy