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.

[Chief Corn]

great thanks! that worked for me. voted, deleted votes in admin, voted again, and no double posting.

[Ted S]

Perfect!

[Megatr0n]

Hi Ted,

Any idea when the new version will be released containing the phrase fixes?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Megatr0n

Hi Ted,

Any idea when the new version will be released containing the phrase fixes?

Sorry, it's been a long long week. What phrase bug did I leave outstanding? AdminCP content or something else?

[Megatr0n]

AdminCP.

[Ted S]

This weekend.

[Chief Corn]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Perfect!

The double posting bug is still in there for me unfortunately. I uninstalled and reinstalled the mod to make sure, but I can still reproduce it. After running ha_revote.php it's fine to vote, but if I clear the rating history, and vote again it double posts.

There aren't any other reports of this happening from other users so I'm wondering if it's just my end. I was thinking of just setting up ha_revote.php as a cron job, but I don't see myself clearing the rating history at all once my forum gets going.

Anybody with a test forum want to test this out?

[Saviour]

Not sure if this has been covered...

I'm showing a duplicate topic on the second page of helpfulanswers.php. Take a look here: http://glitchpc.com/forums/helpfulan...ers&order=desc

Now go to the second page. It shows a topic that has already been listed on the first page.

Is there a fix for this?

Running vB 3.8.4...

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Chief Corn

The double posting bug is still in there for me unfortunately. I uninstalled and reinstalled the mod to make sure, but I can still reproduce it. After running ha_revote.php it's fine to vote, but if I clear the rating history, and vote again it double posts.

There aren't any other reports of this happening from other users so I'm wondering if it's just my end. I was thinking of just setting up ha_revote.php as a cron job, but I don't see myself clearing the rating history at all once my forum gets going.

Anybody with a test forum want to test this out?

No other users have reported double posting aside from during an import process. This leads me to believe there is either a change to the modification or another modification impacting this one.

For your next step please try the attached helpfulanswers.php file which will tell you if a new record is being created or if there is an update. If there are already votes on a post you should ONLY get an update.

If you are seeing created instead of updates you will need to check that the field totalrank is getting populated in the table helpfulpost.

You can do this with the simple query: SELECT totalrank FROM helpfulpost WHERE postid = X

X is the id of the post.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Saviour

Not sure if this has been covered...

I'm showing a duplicate topic on the second page of helpfulanswers.php. Take a look here: http://glitchpc.com/forums/helpfulan...ers&order=desc

Now go to the second page. It shows a topic that has already been listed on the first page.

Is there a fix for this?

Running vB 3.8.4...

The top answers page will show each post as a different item. Are you sure this is a duplication of posts or could it just be two posts in the same thread?