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.

[jGas]

hi, i've upgraded to the latest version of helpful ansers, i use vb 3.8.4 but when i try to open helpfulanswers.php i get a database error.

here the link to the page: http://www.musicadigitale.net/forum/helpfulanswers.php

thank you

[designBox]

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

Hi Ted,
First of all, thank you for this awesome hack.
I was today wondering, Is this feature still on your todo list?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by designBox

Hi Ted,
First of all, thank you for this awesome hack.
I was today wondering, Is this feature still on your todo list?

Yes it is. I'm hoping 4.0 introduces some better ways to handle this and iwll be looking at feature release in the next few weeks.

[jGas]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Yes it is. I'm hoping 4.0 introduces some better ways to handle this and iwll be looking at feature release in the next few weeks.

Originally Posted by jGas

hi, i've upgraded to the latest version of helpful ansers, i use vb 3.8.4 but when i try to open helpfulanswers.php i get a database error.

here the link to the page: http://www.musicadigitale.net/forum/helpfulanswers.php

thank you

hi ted, if i upgrade to vb4, will my problem disappear?

thank you

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jGas

hi ted, if i upgrade to vb4, will my problem disappear?

thank you

Not sure.

[Loller]

Ted S, good day! Thank you for your great module!
I have a trouble, though. When I delete user's post ratings, reputation points for this post are not deleted. Can you please fix this issue?

[jGas]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Not sure.

so why do i have this problem?

[Brandon Sheley]

how do you get those figures?
used 400,000 times?
is there a call to your site in the code?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Loco.M

how do you get those figures?
used 400,000 times?
is there a call to your site in the code?

There is an anonymous tracking feature which is controlled through the admin. Many sites disable it (or at least many more have it installed than the unique count of sites were tracking) but some keep it going and that's where the data comes from.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jGas

so why do i have this problem?

I'll let you know when I dive in this weekend.