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.

[jl255]

the reputation weightage doesn't seem to work for negative rep. I've set the weightage to 10% of rep power. But when members give a negative rating, it reduces by 1 reputation point regardless of the power of the member giving the negative rating.

can you pls check that?

[Ted S]

Ok boys & girls. Here's the moment many of you have been waiting for / begging for / hitting me over the head about... collapsed negative posts just like in the vB4 version!

To update just upload the new XML file and check your settings. You'll see all the needed options to hide negative posts.

Thanks to Simon Lloyd for the vb3 test site! Since I only have his test site I'm considering this beta.

More updates to come soon so let me know any issues or suggestions!

[jl255]

seems awesome, tks Ted!

but think you can share alittle more on this new feature? i checked out the vb4 version and don't find any too.

if the post is collapsed, can users still see it if they want to? what if its the first post of the thread?

tks!

[Simon Lloyd]

Nice work Ted, even if you uncollapse the post it still appears collapsed when you revisit the thread. Not for me Ted as i don't mind people seeing negative posts (a balance is always good) but how much work would it be to have an admin option to make the post hidden to usergroups {.....,x ,xx, xxx......etc), perhaps an admin option, this way you could have the post hidden if it really isn't needed for your forum from your membership but could still have it indexed by search engines. Maybe, and i know this is probably a huge amount of work, you could have an admin only /hiddenhelpfulanswers.php where there would be a table of posts that admin could visit to change the status or perform admin.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by jl255

seems awesome, tks Ted!

but think you can share alittle more on this new feature? i checked out the vb4 version and don't find any too.

if the post is collapsed, can users still see it if they want to? what if its the first post of the thread?

tks!

I'll explain more now and get some screenshots up later.

Basically you can set a threshold for votes and any post with a score under that is automatically collapsed. Users can still expand it if they wish to view it, it just doesn't show up until they do.

So for example, you could say that posts with -100 are hidden or posts with -1. You decide.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

Nice work Ted, even if you uncollapse the post it still appears collapsed when you revisit the thread. Not for me Ted as i don't mind people seeing negative posts (a balance is always good) but how much work would it be to have an admin option to make the post hidden to usergroups {.....,x ,xx, xxx......etc), perhaps an admin option, this way you could have the post hidden if it really isn't needed for your forum from your membership but could still have it indexed by search engines. Maybe, and i know this is probably a huge amount of work, you could have an admin only /hiddenhelpfulanswers.php where there would be a table of posts that admin could visit to change the status or perform admin.

Unfortunately there's no way to use the default collapse system, hide the post by default and respect the cookie system. It's either expanded by default (like the forum home) or always collapsed on load.

What you're explaining is actually pretty simple to implement. Search engines can still see the posts as it's just javascript that hides them but google is pretty bright and the display:none; attribute may upset it, so it's definitely a good idea.

Would you see this being a user option or just an admin setting?

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Unfortunately there's no way to use the default collapse system, hide the post by default and respect the cookie system. It's either expanded by default (like the forum home) or always collapsed on load.

What you're explaining is actually pretty simple to implement. Search engines can still see the posts as it's just javascript that hides them but google is pretty bright and the display:none; attribute may upset it, so it's definitely a good idea.

Would you see this being a user option or just an admin setting?

I would have thought that it should be an admin option as then you have complete control over how your board looks, but in the spirit of forums being free and the information on them maybe it should be a user option or maybe a combination....e.g

AdminCp>Usergroups:
Usergroups that can see unhelpful answers:
does not overide above, adds selection to UserCp
Usergroups that can hide/unhide unhelpful answers:

UserCP:
Always display unhelpful posts: Yes No

So, if we are giving control to the user maybe we wouldn't have to use JS (although its a pretty neat way of doing it), perhaps we could use a template conditional for the usergroup that refers to the AdminCp & UserCp setting, like i have said previously im no coder and i'm probably looking at it too simplistic!

[Simon Lloyd]

As an added Ted, maybe, if you want to use JS then couldn't you build the conditional or whatever to actually display the post or not use display:none for google using the useragent string to recognise it?

Or am i talking complete rubbish?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

As an added Ted, maybe, if you want to use JS then couldn't you build the conditional or whatever to actually display the post or not use display:none for google using the useragent string to recognise it?

Or am i talking complete rubbish?

Yes you can but google doesn't have to use the user agent string at all times. I'll add this in as an option.

[jl255]

tks for the explanation, sure helps!

any answer regarding the negative rep and weightage issue i posted above? tks.