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 sockwater

I'm not quite following you. Post #1054 shows how, with one query, you can pull all the information (what the vote was, the voter's username & userid) on each vote for each post being displayed in the thread, and puts it in an array that's indexed by postid. You can use that array to display all a given post's votes, showing what the vote was and linking the voter's username to their profile below the postbit when that post author is viewing the thread. I was only showing you how it can be done with one query per thread instead of one query for each post in the thread. No restructuring of the vote data needed. Hopefully I've explained this well.

sockwater,

Your example is very useful however the feature people have been asking for is a summary of a user's entire voting results (i.e. votes to all of their posts). So to do this I would still need to fetch all of their posts... hence the extra query. There are a few other requests where I think the code you provided would come in handy but the big one I've been working to address is the overall voting results.

I've already mapped out ways to do this without an extra query but with a few changes to the tables (creating an overall history for each user) and that's my next step.

[Chief Corn]

I read that it was fixed a few pages ago, but I'm having duplicate post issue. I don't remember this happening when I first installed this a few days ago. I remember the last changes I made were editing the template for digg style, and turning negative voting off. I went back turning negative vote on and removing the digg style but it's still double posting. Not sure what happened or if it was happening from the beginning.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Chief Corn

I read that it was fixed a few pages ago, but I'm having duplicate post issue. I don't remember this happening when I first installed this a few days ago. I remember the last changes I made were editing the template for digg style, and turning negative voting off. I went back turning negative vote on and removing the digg style but it's still double posting. Not sure what happened or if it was happening from the beginning.

Have you imported any older data? What version are you running?

[Chief Corn]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Have you imported any older data? What version are you running?

This is a new install of 1.9.5 on vBulletin 3.8.4. I have the manual template variable enabled. I cleared the votes and the double post is above the original voted post. The one that says 4294967294 members like this.

http://www.southbaybodywork.com/mass...look-like.html

[Ted S]

I'm not see any example in the url you posted?

[Chief Corn]

Originally Posted by Ted S

I'm not see any example in the url you posted?

http://www.southbaybodywork.com/mass...ke.html#post11

[Ted S]

I see the text "4294967294 members like this"

It looks like you have modified things a bit. Can you explain?

[Chief Corn]

I remember first enabling manual template, and putting this in my postbit

<div id="helpfulanswers_box_$post[postid]" class="smallfont">
$helpful_answers</div>

I changed the guest vote URL to link directly to register.php.

Did the Digg style change, enabling hide vote on first post, disallowing negative responses, enabling self voting.

I enabled get top post for thread, and added this to my showthread to link to the highest rated thread.

<a href="$vboptions[bburl]/showthread.php?t=$threadid#post$thread[toppost]">

And changing the phrase $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_x_found] to {1} members like this.

I'm pretty sure there weren't any changes to the plugins. All reputation settings are disabled. I'm not sure where it's getting the number 4294967294.

Edit: I Googled the number and found this interesting:

2^32-1 = 4,294,967,295   

This is the value of an unsigned 32 bit integer: 0 to +4,294,967,295

In other words, there is a type bug someone in vBadvanced that is causing this in numerous places in vBa and vBulleting. We have the same problem when we delete a link by a user who has posted only one link. The post count of that user always goes to 4,294,967,295. Running cleanup scripts does not help.

[Ted S]

Got it. Thanks for all the history.

It appears you have a few duplicate tables out there. I will write a little script to fix these and hopefully get rid of the issue.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Chief Corn

I remember first enabling manual template, and putting this in my postbit

<div id="helpfulanswers_box_$post[postid]" class="smallfont">
$helpful_answers</div>

I changed the guest vote URL to link directly to register.php.

Did the Digg style change, enabling hide vote on first post, disallowing negative responses, enabling self voting.

I enabled get top post for thread, and added this to my showthread to link to the highest rated thread.

<a href="$vboptions[bburl]/showthread.php?t=$threadid#post$thread[toppost]">

And changing the phrase $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_x_found] to {1} members like this.

I'm pretty sure there weren't any changes to the plugins. All reputation settings are disabled. I'm not sure where it's getting the number 4294967294.

Edit: I Googled the number and found this interesting:

2^32-1 = 4,294,967,295   
 
This is the value of an unsigned 32 bit integer: 0 to +4,294,967,295
 
In other words, there is a type bug someone in vBadvanced that is causing this in numerous places in vBa and vBulleting. We have the same problem when we delete a link by a user who has posted only one link. The post count of that user always goes to 4,294,967,295. Running cleanup scripts does not help.

Go ahead and run ha_revote.php from the first post of this thread. That will remove all of the duplicates.

If they return let me know.