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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by aspecialthing

I tried editing that a few different ways: taking out all references to "helpfulanswer_no" and "ha_thumbsdn.gif"/"ha_thumbsdn_gray.gif" and taking out just the "no" and "thumbsdn" references (respectively) after "else /" but it didn't work.

Does it matter that my actual vote icons are "ha_plus.png" and "ha_minus.png" maybe? Is there a different template that references those image/links? I tried to do a search for "ha_minus.png" but didn't find anything...

Thanks again for all the help.

Tracking this all down is going to require me to fix it so as soon as I have a chance I'll do just that. I appologize for the delay.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by aspecialthing

Sorry if this has already been covered in the thread -- I wasn't able to find an answer. When the mod is set to allow negative responses, clicking "plus" or "minus" (or thumbs up/down, or whatever) immediately counts the vote and shows how many members liked the post. But when I change "allow negative responses" to "no" in the options, entering a vote reloads the thread at the first page. This discourages voting, especially in long threads, where people might want to quickly approve of a comment without being whisked away to page 1, forcing them to click back to where they were to continue reading. I also prefer the plus/minus icon buttons to the text link for voting, but the main thing is that I want to disallow negative votes without making a cast vote reload the thread.

How do I do that? I am pretty sure this is not something I can do in the options, so can someone point me to the file I need to edit and what I need to do to simply removed the "minus" button link from the plus/minus vote? I went so far as to replace the minus icon with a black box to make the button "invisible," but users quickly figured out they could still vote negative, and seemingly were more apt to do so knowing that the admins were trying to discourage it.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

I wasn't able to duplicate this issue. Which voting option are you using?

[kawe]

Teds

how to enable it ?

$helpfulposts[totalranks] - The total ratings of a member's ppsts
$helpfulposts[goodranks] - The total good ratings of a member's posts
$helpfulposts[badranks] - The total bad ratings of a member's posts

i have already add to postbit_legacy
but total good ranks dont show
and total bad ranks dont show too
have any idea ?

[Ted S]

They don't need to be enabled... As long as you have the module on.

It's possible you'll need to switch to variables $post[goodrank] $post[totalrank] and $post[badrank]

Let me knwo if those work for you.

[kawe]

Originally Posted by Ted S

They don't need to be enabled... As long as you have the module on.

It's possible you'll need to switch to variables $post[goodrank] $post[totalrank] and $post[badrank]

Let me knwo if those work for you.

ur variables $post[goodrank] $post[totalrank] and $post[badrank] just for show a HOW MANY RANK in CURRENT POST. I want show all Rank
Sum from all $post[goodrank] on all post from user

do u know what i mean Teds ?

[Ted S]

There is no variable to show all the rankings a user has got as that would require a query for every post in a thread.

[kawe]

Originally Posted by Ted S

There is no variable to show all the rankings a user has got as that would require a query for every post in a thread.

can you make this for update Ted S ?
like Post Thank You Hack have total thanks from all post member
please Ted S i think this is a good feature

[hubie]

Hi, is it possible to add an option to qualify only the first post of a thread? And not the following posts.
Thanks.

[Ted S]

Yes but it will require a code edit to product-helpful_answers.xml as follows:

Find:

if($this->registry->options['helpans_hidefirst'] AND $this->post['postid'] == $this->thread['firstpostid']){
      $show['helpfulanswer'] = false;
      $show['rate_helpfulanswer'] = false;
     }

Change to:

if($this->post['postid'] != $this->thread['firstpostid']){
      $show['helpfulanswer'] = false;
      $show['rate_helpfulanswer'] = false;
     }

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by kawe

can you make this for update Ted S ?
like Post Thank You Hack have total thanks from all post member
please Ted S i think this is a good feature

Having a query on every post of a thread is a terrible idea that would add huge load to servers.

In 2.0 I will address this issue with some additional updates to the data structure but won't be releasing that version until I get enough new features to warrant it.