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.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

I'm pleased to announce the release of version 1.4.0 which contains several major feature updates and a few bug fixes. See the complete change log below:

- (Feature) Added optional integration with the reputation system
- (Feature) Added optional variable to identify the top rated thread in template conditionals
- (Feature) Added optional statistics to a user's profile
- (Admin) Added Bulk tool to enable system in forums
- (Admin) Option to disable automatic template plugin
- (System) Add overall rank variable for template conditionals
- (System) Auto add to templates for easier installs (no more templates to edit)
- (System) Added hook locations throughout addon
- (Bug) Fixes issue where non-ajax users weren't getting votes counted
- (Bug) Don't show HR line if no votes and user cant vote

This wraps up most of the requested features on my list. If there's something you would like to see added that was not put into 1.4.0 please let me know.

And of course as a new release please report any bugs or errors you find.

When "Enable Profile Voting Stats" is turned on this warning is thrown in the user's profile:

Warning: Division by zero in /home/SITE/public_html/includes/class_profileblock.php(250) : eval()'d code on line 50

Also, the second option "Manual Template Placement" - I think that title is wrong (If enabled the user's profile will reflect total good, bad and total ratings of their posts. Adds a query each time a user's profile is viewed.)

[Ted S]

Edit, I appologize but I spoke too quickly on this...

What you're looking to do isn't difficult but it's also not native to addon... But that doesn't need to stop you. What is a concern is the number of queries added (one per post).

Votes are stored in a table and along side the post but not with the user so to fetch them you need separately from the big query that fetches threads. If you're interested in this (realize it's one query per post) let me know and I can write up the code.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

When "Enable Profile Voting Stats" is turned on this warning is thrown in the user's profile:

Thanks. Are you using 1.4.1 which I posted a bit back or 1.4.0?

Also, the second option "Manual Template Placement" - I think that title is wrong (If enabled the user's profile will reflect total good, bad and total ratings of their posts. Adds a query each time a user's profile is viewed.)

Thanks. Will fix...

[Ted S]

Version 1.4.2 posted which fixes a mess-up in the admin option phrases causing some confusion over a stats tool. Just a mislabeled field, upgrading is not necessary.

[GigaSb]

how do i make the text to be in the right side?

I added div align into postbit_legacy:

<div align="right">
$helpful_answers
</div>

it worked at first.. but when updated to last version its not effecting.

[jlew24asu]

installed. so is this supposed to only show up in the first post of the thread or all posts? (in a given forum)

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jlew24asu

installed. so is this supposed to only show up in the first post of the thread or all posts? (in a given forum)

This modification is for rating all posts in a thread.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jlew24asu

installed. so is this supposed to only show up in the first post of the thread or all posts? (in a given forum)

You can either wrap the code in a table cell aligned right or edit the template helpful_answers to change the alignment of the DIV.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Thanks. Are you using 1.4.1 which I posted a bit back or 1.4.0?



Thanks. Will fix...

I was using 1.4.0. Updated to 1.4.2 which fixed both problems. thanks!

[jlew24asu]

ok thanks Ted