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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Willy T

Of course I have. Unless it's hidden or rephrased, I only have any option that shows hide first post rating & not the other way around.

I want it so you can only vote on the first post & not the rest. What option would this be under?

Thank you kindly for your quick replies. It is greatly appreciated.

Gotcha! You can easily reverse that function... best solution for how the mod works right now.

[sross]

Hi, so far this is looking like a great mod for my forum. All I need is a way to show the ratings activity in my forumdisplay.. so there is a column in the list of threads that shows the rating, or it shows where the original vbuletin rating stars used to show. Is this possible? Thanks for any tips!

[angeljs]

Originally Posted by wastemytime

Invalid SQL:

INSERT INTO vb_helpfulanswer
SET postid = 259155, threadid = 18705, userid = 1, yesno = '1', dateline = 1283840962;

MySQL-Error: Unknown column 'threadid' in 'field list'

I'm having this same problem. Was this fixed?

Edit: I managed to fix this by running this query in the database:

ALTER TABLE `helpfulanswer` ADD `threadid` INT(10) NULL

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by angeljs

I'm having this same problem. Was this fixed?

Edit: I managed to fix this by running this query in the database:

ALTER TABLE `helpfulanswer` ADD `threadid` INT(10) NULL

This is part of the install routine but it sounds like it didn't get exexcuted. Glad you sorted it out!

[The Rocketeer]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Just add a margin attribute (style="margin-right:10px;") to the div in the helpful_answers template. If this sounds like greek let me know.

Hi Ted,

I did as you suggested, but didnt really work for me...
do you have another fix

<div id="helpfulanswers_box_{vb:raw post.postid}" style="text-align:right; margin-right:10px;">

[Ted S]

Helpful Answers Users -

It's been a long time since this mod had a major update and I want to see what, if any, features would make it better for you. Is there a different way you'd like to see HA work? Another voting or reporting option? More controls? More interactions?

Share your thoughts for the next update!

[SemperFideles]

I was wondering when a new release might be imminent. Here is my wish list:

- Ability from product settings to set location of the helpful answers below the signature without the need for a manual edit of the template.
- Ability to select to display the usernames of those who found the post helpful (i.e. next to where it says "5 users found this post helpful" list their usernames separated by commas.)
- Ability to display on a user's postbit the number of helpful posts (i.e. below his post count list "Helpful Posts: 200")
- Ability to find all the helpful posts a user has made within his profile.
- Ability to find all the posts a user found helpful within his profile.

[SemperFideles]

Adding another feature (actually it's a bug fix).

- Fix Helpful Answers page to correspond to the permissions that users have to read threads and thread titles.

The current "rollup page" allows unregistered users to see the thread titles of threads that are in the Admin and Mod fora. I've had this feature on for a while and I shudder to think what some unregistered users have been able to see in terms of thread titles in our Moderating fora. This is a HUGE bug.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by SemperFideles

Adding another feature (actually it's a bug fix).

- Fix Helpful Answers page to correspond to the permissions that users have to read threads and thread titles.

The current "rollup page" allows unregistered users to see the thread titles of threads that are in the Admin and Mod fora. I've had this feature on for a while and I shudder to think what some unregistered users have been able to see in terms of thread titles in our Moderating fora. This is a HUGE bug.

Bug implies something that works incorrectly from how it was designed. This page was built this way from day one as few people let rating in areas they wanted private and documented as such but I digress..

I suppose we can suffer the additional query overhead to do this checking if that's what people prefer.

[SemperFideles]

Good point. I guess I didn't read the documentation carefully enough. There are private forums where users would like to note that they found a post helpful but that doesn't imply that the data concerning what the post was about should have permissions to be viewed outside the members-only area. I guess I had grown accustomed to other products that maintain forum permissions when displaying data.