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]

Version 1.4.2 posted which fixes a mess-up in the admin option phrases causing some confusion over a stats tool. Just a mislabeled field, upgrading is not necessary.

[Sun Boy]

seems like a great mod.. but unfortunately I've been unable to install it .. the installer page keeps loading and then I get a "time out" error, and the mod is not installed..
any help?

[WoodiE]

Just upgraded to 1.4.2 and just just two questions.

1. Since I have been running the old version - do I need to go back and re-edit my templates to remove the code I had to add for the previous versions?

2. Enable Profile Voting Stats - II doesn't seem to work. I can enable Stats I and it shows in the users profile how many times they have voted. If I enable Stats II as well nothing changes in their profile. If I disable Stats I and only leave II enabled then the users profile has the legend box "Helpful Postings" but no information. Any suggestions for this?

[WoodiE]

Just thought of this, but a cool feature if possible. If there is a hook to add a link to the Features menu then maybe the option to add a link to the Top Rated posts would be nice.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Sun Boy

seems like a great mod.. but unfortunately I've been unable to install it .. the installer page keeps loading and then I get a "time out" error, and the mod is not installed..
any help?

Sounds like you may be having issues with accessing your mySQL database. What other mods have you installed?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by WoodiE

1. Since I have been running the old version - do I need to go back and re-edit my templates to remove the code I had to add for the previous versions?

That's up to you. If you prefer you can leave the code and just change the options to "Enable Manual Override"

[/quote]

2. Enable Profile Voting Stats - II doesn't seem to work. I can enable Stats I and it shows in the users profile how many times they have voted. If I enable Stats II as well nothing changes in their profile. If I disable Stats I and only leave II enabled then the users profile has the legend box "Helpful Postings" but no information. Any suggestions for this?

Are you sure you're looking at a profile for a user who has had their threads rated?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by WoodiE

Just thought of this, but a cool feature if possible. If there is a hook to add a link to the Features menu then maybe the option to add a link to the Top Rated posts would be nice.

It's early but I'm not quite following this... can you explain a bit more?

[WoodiE]

Originally Posted by Ted S

It's early but I'm not quite following this... can you explain a bit more?

What I'm asking is, is there a way to add an option to this add-on to automatically add a link to the Top Rated Threads list into the Navbar drop down menu called "Features"?

I think the only way to do this would be to manually edit the navbar template which I have already but didn't know if there was a way to do this automatically - similar to how you've auto add to templates in the postbit.

Make sense?

[Ted S]

I don't believe "Features" is a navtive part of the navbar (it's something manually put there) so it's unlikely there would be any hooks to it.

While I am a believer in making life easy and keeping the mod as quick to install as possible, some things are better when you have to customize them as one size does not always fit all. Placing an item into a nav drop down has a lot of impact on the rest of the site so I'd rather have those who want it do it manually in the way they want it. Hope that makes sense.

[mad@Max]

All work nice. One suggestion. When reputation is enabled and after voting in profile adding comments to given reputation as "Helpful Answer Rating", ignoring positive it or negative.
Would like to see the phrase were different