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 haothiencz

Is there any way to make it intergate with vbcredits?

User can get more credit when receives good rate and losse credit with bad vote?

Thank you in advanced.

There is no integration mod with vB Credits that I have seen to this point.

[Spinball]

Some questions/suggestions.
1) I think it would be useful to allow people to switch the 'helpful answer' functionality on for a particular thread when they create a it. I think this is preferable to allowing people to vote into threads which are not appropriate for voting. E.g. 'You'll never guess who I bumped into on holiday'. It would be a tickbox in the new thread page. Is this doable?

2) Would it be possible to allow people to vote for one post in a thread only? I.e. if they vote for a new post, their previous vote for a different post is removed? That way, if a better answer is posted and people vote for it, the older, less useful post will lose votes and hopefully fall more rapidly below the new post in popularity.

3) Displaying the most helpful answer. How difficult would it be to, if there is a helpful answer voted, display a line under the first post (a bit like the 'Thank you' line in the Post Thank You mod) which shows there is a 'most helpful answer'. The line has the usual category open/collapse button. The button is collapsed by default. When someone clicks the open button, the post is displayed like when you expand/contract a category. So you show the thread like we're used to seeing threads, but if people want to see the most helpful answer, they just click the open button in the line under the first post.

Any of these ideas sound any good?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Spinball

Some questions/suggestions.
1) I think it would be useful to allow people to switch the 'helpful answer' functionality on for a particular thread when they create a it. I think this is preferable to allowing people to vote into threads which are not appropriate for voting. E.g. 'You'll never guess who I bumped into on holiday'. It would be a tickbox in the new thread page. Is this doable?

Possible, sure. It's just not designed to to that.

2) Would it be possible to allow people to vote for one post in a thread only? I.e. if they vote for a new post, their previous vote for a different post is removed? That way, if a better answer is posted and people vote for it, the older, less useful post will lose votes and hopefully fall more rapidly below the new post in popularity.

Yes it would be. This requires one additional SQL check on voting.

3) Displaying the most helpful answer. How difficult would it be to, if there is a helpful answer voted, display a line under the first post (a bit like the 'Thank you' line in the Post Thank You mod) which shows there is a 'most helpful answer'. The line has the usual category open/collapse button. The button is collapsed by default. When someone clicks the open button, the post is displayed like when you expand/contract a category. So you show the thread like we're used to seeing threads, but if people want to see the most helpful answer, they just click the open button in the line under the first post.

The first part is simple enough and already offered. Getting the post to show up directly is tricky since you have to query and build it which seems redundant. Why not just link to it directly and avoid the server load?

Interesting stuff that I'll definitely consider after building the 4.0 version.

[Spinball]

Originally Posted by Ted S

The first part is simple enough and already offered. Getting the post to show up directly is tricky since you have to query and build it which seems redundant. Why not just link to it directly and avoid the server load?

Server load will be something to consider. If the answer is on the same page, will the user just be scrolled down to it using a # link? That would be the most efficient.
Otherwise, providing a link to the best answer means people will click the link to open a new page. And that had got to use more server resources than the additional query to present the answer under the first post?

Originally Posted by Ted S

Interesting stuff that I'll definitely consider after building the 4.0 version.

:up:
I'll not be upgrading to 4, by the way. I need my forums to work!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Spinball

Server load will be something to consider. If the answer is on the same page, will the user just be scrolled down to it using a # link? That would be the most efficient.
Otherwise, providing a link to the best answer means people will click the link to open a new page. And that had got to use more server resources than the additional query to present the answer under the first post?

Yes and no. The load for the user who clicks it wil be higher but the overall load will be lower as the script doesn't have to query to get the post for every thread view, just when someone wants to see that answer.

Originally Posted by Spinball

I'll not be upgrading to 4, by the way. I need my forums to work!

Well that makes two of us but unfortunately many people will so that's my first goal...

[Spinball]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Well that makes two of us but unfortunately many people will so that's my first goal...

LOL I think that when they realise that 4 is so bug-riddled and server hungry, they'll be so desperate to roll back to their previously installed version that installing plugins will be the least of their worries But fair enough.

[christicehurst]

I'm looking through the list of helpful posters list but it shows up the person who gives it away or not the person who made the helpful post.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by christicehurst

I'm looking through the list of helpful posters list but it shows up the person who gives it away or not the person who made the helpful post.

I'm not following what you mean by the person who gives it away?

[christicehurst]

The person who gives it the thumbs up. There's no list of people who receive the thumps up or down. Only a list of the people who voted.

[jGas]

hi, thanks for this great mod!

i'm using it and it works, but i have a problem when i try to open helpfulanswers.php and "Enable Most Helpful Answers" is on.

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.1:

Invalid SQL:

		SELECT post.postid,post.title as posttile,helpfulpost.goodrank,helpfulpost.totalrank,helpfulpost.lastvote,
			thread.threadid,thread.title as title,thread.postusername as postusername,forum.title as ftitle ,goodrank as avgrank
			
		FROM vb_helpfulpost as helpfulpost
		INNER JOIN vb_post AS post ON(helpfulpost.postid = post.postid)
		INNER JOIN vb_thread AS thread ON(post.threadid = thread.threadid)
		INNER JOIN vb_forum AS forum ON(thread.forumid = forum.forumid)
		WHERE goodrank > 0
			
			
		ORDER BY avgrank desc
		LIMIT 0, 25;

MySQL Error   : Column 'goodrank' in field list is ambiguous
Error Number  : 1052
Request Date  : Sunday, December 13th 2009 @ 05:44:40 AM
Error Date    : Sunday, December 13th 2009 @ 05:44:40 AM
Script        : http://www.musicadigitale.net/forum/helpfulanswers.php?do=topanswers
Referrer      : 
IP Address    : 151.68.52.235
Username      : Mr Gas
Classname     : vB_Database_MySQLi
MySQL Version : 5.0.87-community

what should i do to fix it?

thanks =)