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]

TheInsaneManiac - I certainly don't try and make comparisons about if another modification is better or worse than mine. The Post Ranking System is a great application with some similar features and some different ones. Both mods attempt to rank posts but how the voting is done, what options exist and how things are displayed back is simply different. The biggest gap being that the Post Ranking System shows the magnitude of votes (lowest ranked, highest ranked) and mine shows the exact vote count -- it's two different approaches and you should use whichever best fits your needs.

As for your feature ideas:

1. Topic Rating - See my Helpful Threads modification which is for rating topics and not posts.

2. Bad Rating - I'm open on this. How do you see it working? What constitutes bad (1 negative or 100)?

3 - Quick Links - Already exists in the Most Helpful Answers Page.

[EagleNick]

I have a suggestion: When viewing rating history in the AdminCP, it would be nice to have a column of the name of the user who made the post that was rated. (See screenshot; in this view I am viewing all of "OneUpDave's" ratings, but I would like to see the post author for each entry).
This would make it easier to identify abuse of the system. How? We could see if a user is marking the posts of his friend as helpful (regardless of if they are helpful or not) while marking any other post as unhelpful.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by EagleNick

I have a suggestion: When viewing rating history in the AdminCP, it would be nice to have a column of the name of the user who made the post that was rated. (See screenshot; in this view I am viewing all of "OneUpDave's" ratings, but I would like to see the post author for each entry).
This would make it easier to identify abuse of the system. How? We could see if a user is marking the posts of his friend as helpful (regardless of if they are helpful or not) while marking any other post as unhelpful.

Very simple change. I've made the update but don't want to release a whole new version for just this so in the mean time, here's the file for those who want it.

Upload the new plugin file and upload/admincp/helpfulanswers.php

[EagleNick]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Very simple change. I've made the update but don't want to release a whole new version for just this so in the mean time, here's the file for those who want it.

Upload the new plugin file and upload/admincp/helpfulanswers.php

Ted, you are perhaps the most dependable coder/developer here. Simply extravagant.

One small quirk: It lists the thread author (whoever created the first post of the thread), but what I would rather have is the author of the post that was rated.

Example: John creates a thread. Mark replies with an explanation. Dave marks Mark's post as helpful.
In the AdminCP, it shows John as the thread author for Dave's rating; it should list Mark as the author of the post that was rated.

Did that make any sense? :lol:

[Ted S]

That's what I get for not reading through your entire post...

Attached a new admincp/helpfulanswers.php file (one word change to make it happen).

And thanks for the kind words! Definitely nice to hear good comments about my coding seeing as how I am not a coder IRL.

[Trana]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Did you put that TD into a new table row? Is it in a table at all? What else is in the table?

Here is the beginning of my postbit_legacy:

<table id="post$post[postid]" class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<tr>
<if condition="$show['announcement']">
<td class="thead" style="font-weight:normal" colspan="2">
<img class="inlineimg" src="$stylevar[imgdir_statusicon]/post_$post[statusicon].gif" alt="$post[statustitle]" border="0" />
<phrase 1="$post[startdate]" 2="$post[enddate]">$vbphrase[x_until_y]</phrase>


</td>
<else />
<td class="thead" style="font-weight:normal; border: $stylevar[cellspacing]px solid $stylevar[tborder_bgcolor]; border-right: 0px" $post[scrolltothis]>
<!-- status icon and date -->
<a name="post$post[postid]"><img class="inlineimg" src="$stylevar[imgdir_statusicon]/post_$post[statusicon].gif" alt="$post[statustitle]" border="0" /></a>
$post[postdate]<if condition="!$show['detailedtime']">, $post[posttime]</if>
$post[firstnewinsert]
<!-- / status icon and date -->
</td>
<td class="thead" style="font-weight:normal" align="$stylevar[right]">

$helpful_answers

&nbsp;
<if condition="$show['postcount']">#<a href="showpost.php?$session[sessionurl]p=$post[postid]&amp;postcount=$post[postcount]" target="new" rel="nofollow" id="postcount$post[postid]" name="$post[postcount]"><strong>$post[postcount]</strong></a>
</if>
<if condition="$show['inlinemod']">
<input type="checkbox" name="plist[$postid]" id="plist_$postid" style="vertical-align:middle; padding:0px; margin:0px 0px 0px 5px" value="$post[checkbox_value]" />

<if condition="$show['infraction']"><div>$vbphrase[infractions]: $post[warnings]/$post[infractions] ($post[ipoints])</div></if>
<if condition="$show['infractionlink']"><a href="infraction.php?$session[sessionurl]do=report&amp;p=$post[postid]" rel="nofollow"><img class="inlineimg" src="$stylevar[imgdir_button]/infraction.gif" alt="<phrase 1="$post[username]">$vbphrase[add_infraction_for_x]</phrase>" border="0" /></a></if>
$post[iplogged]
</if>

$template_hook[postbit_messagearea_start]
</td>
</if>
</tr>

[Ted S]

Create a new table just for the helpful answers content.

[Trana]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Create a new table just for the helpful answers content.

Within the existing TD?

[Ted S]

Sure. It's not about the existing table (there are tons on the page). It's about using a new one to align the elements as you want them to be.

One cell to have the display bit, another for whatever else you want on that line.

[Trana]

OK, that makes everything show up on the same line, thanks.