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.

[cooltechie]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Are you already using the addon? If so, what version?

I downloaded (1.8.4) and started to use it yesterday. Once it was installed, I decided to use the ha-import.php file. ha-import.php file was copied to admincp and launched from there. Should I do something differently?

[Ted S]

No that's ok. I will need to revist the import script to work with 1.8.. The version I posted runs with 1.9 beta and the first version you used was for 1.7.

[cooltechie]

Originally Posted by Ted S

No that's ok. I will need to revist the import script to work with 1.8.. The version I posted runs with 1.9 beta and the first version you used was for 1.7.

Can I leave the mod running along with "thanks" mod and then run the import at a later time or does the import need to run immediately after the install? Hope to see a working import soon so I can get it combined. Thanks for creating this mod and for your support.

[NLP-er]

Are we closer to 1.9 stable I just cannot wait Are new features described somewhere?

[Ted S]

The feature list is a few page back... somewhere.

We're not a whole lot closer as no one has picked up the beta and commented on it which makes it difficult for me to release as a stable. I will be doing more of my own tests to try and move things along.

[Quantnet]

Interestingly enough, the Answer Forum mod is released today
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=218653

[Ted S]

Interesting modification although it looks to be more focused on picking a "best answer" rather than ranking individual answers.

Are there other features you are looking for in my modification that I may be able to bake into 1.9?

[Ted S]

And yes, I will be adding an option to exclude certain threads from this mod. It's a difficult feature to wrap around but I've come up with the idea of giving two options:

1. Let you specify only certain thread IDs to enable for.
2. Let you specify certain thread IDs to exclude from.

[tpearl5]

Ted - can you add a report for how many positive/negative ratings users have received in addition to the existing given report? I would like to run contests based on these reports.

[Ted S]

Shouldn't be a problem.

Ok with entering a username and date range and getting a result?