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 jGas

after <!-- / controls -->
(inside the postbit_legacy!)
i have to do the manual placement because i have also the post thank you hack, and in the image you can see what happens if they work together with the automatic placement:


(grazie = thanks)

alternatively, is there a way to move the automatic placement AFTER the thank you button?

Strange.

I suppose if you changed the order of the plugin it would show up under it.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jGas

after <!-- / controls -->
(inside the postbit_legacy!)
i have to do the manual placement because i have also the post thank you hack, and in the image you can see what happens if they work together with the automatic placement:


(grazie = thanks)

alternatively, is there a way to move the automatic placement AFTER the thank you button?

Please try the attached plugin and let me know if that works for you.

[jGas]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Strange.

I suppose if you changed the order of the plugin it would show up under it.

how to i change the order of the plugins?

i've tried your attachment but it does not load into vbulletin (maybe because now i have 3.8?)

thanks

[Ted S]

Hello Helpful Answers users!

Version 1.5.3 has been released which adds two new features:

First you will now have the option to disable ratings in the first post of a thread as they are often questions and rating does not make sense.

Secondly thanks to contributions by two Maidos and Simon Lloyd I've added thumbs up & down AND positive or negative rating images. By default the thumbs icons will now be used but you can change back to text through your options settings.

To upgrade:

Simply upload the files in the folder upload/images/button to your site and install the new plugin file. No changes have been made to the php files.

[apiasto]

thnx for the good work

[Ted S]

I have released version 1.5.5 which fixes a very small bug with the extensions for plus & minus icons. To upgrade simply upload the new plugin file. No other changes have been made.

Users not using plus and minus images do not need to upgrade.

[tpearl5]

What would it take to allow guests to vote on threads?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

What would it take to allow guests to vote on threads?

There's a fair amount involved in allowing guest voting as the tracking methodology all has to change. Right now we use the userid to see who voted; with guest voting you have to consider IPs, Cookies and possibly the user agent. This has to be updated in a few places (adding a vote, checking for a dup vote, showing the vote link, etc...). Beyond that there's just a few tweaks to let guests get access to the feature and in reporting.

This is definitely not something I see adding to the addon in the near future as an option (options require everything to be turned on and off which adds to more statements and more code to process) but if you were adding this directly it wouldn't be too difficult.

[Ted S]

Today I released 1.7.0 stable.

This update incorporates two small changes adding a last vote column to the top helpful posts page and linking top helpful posts to their full thread to put them in context.

More importantly however 1.7.0 marks the end of the 1.6.x beta series which has been up for a few weeks.

With 1.7 there's a complete change in how post vote summaries are stored (summaries contain the total votes, good votes and last vote time). This change moves away from using the main post table and adds a new table just for helpful answers. For most sites this won't mark a notable difference but for larger sites it will reduce load and limit the number of edits to the post table.

1.7.0 is designed to convert anyone from 1.5.x without notable impact but if you do find yourself missing votes simply run the script ha_revote.php as found in the tools & samples post and your vote history will be resynced.

I look forward to hearing all of your suggestions and comments for 1.8!

[Razasharp]

Hi Ted

I finally got around to installing this on my 3.7 board.

Just a quickie, is it possible to simply change the rating system so that all it shows is the thumbs up/down buttons, along with the number of thumbs ups or downs the post has had next to them?

At the mo it takes up too much space and all that text is not needed as most people know thumbs rating systems these days. If I can do this via template edits - great! Just let me know which templates I need to change

Thanks for a cool plug-in!