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.

[DobieGillis?]

Originally Posted by Andyrew

You dont use ds_store files, there files created by apple mac computers, you can just delete ds_store files

thanks, better support than the coder...appreciate it

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by DobieGillis?

thanks, better support than the coder...appreciate it

Glad Andyrew was able to answer you. And I'm so sorry for not knowing about files that have no relationship to the addon and are specific to an OS I don't happen to use...

[TimberFloorAu]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Look for the link in your admin panel under statistics and logs.

So how can we echo these results onto the forum ? or on a special page for Helpful answers stats ?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TimberFloorAu

So how can we echo these results onto the forum ? or on a special page for Helpful answers stats ?

My appologies as I'm not recalling the original quote. What variable do you want to echo and where (seperate page vs all pages)?

[TimberFloorAu]

Originally Posted by Ted S

My appologies as I'm not recalling the original quote. What variable do you want to echo and where (seperate page vs all pages)?

Apologies Ted.

We would like to display this kind of stats screen to our users.

[TimberFloorAu]

Another thing I aint quite got my head around.

If you find a post Unhelpful.

The result says.

0 out of 1 person found this post helpful

shouldnt that explicitly read:

1 member found this post unhelpful
5 members found this post helpful

etc etc

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TimberFloorAu

Apologies Ted.

We would like to display this kind of stats screen to our users.

Im so sorry but I'm not following you... That page exists to show to your users; is there something you want changed in it or do you just want to embed it into another page?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TimberFloorAu

Another thing I aint quite got my head around.

If you find a post Unhelpful.

The result says.

0 out of 1 person found this post helpful

shouldnt that explicitly read:

1 member found this post unhelpful
5 members found this post helpful

etc etc

This feature is modeled after a few sites that do something similar and the verbiage was written for the site I first built it for.

Of course that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to approach it that work just as well or better. You can easily change the text either by editing the template helpful_answers or by changing the proper phrase. Variables are available to tell you bad ratings ($post[badrank]) as well as good ratings ($post[goodrank]). Play around and make it work right for you.

If you need help just let me know...

[Quantnet]

I was running the Rating history stat and found one user which the stats showing he rating twice for the same post. I was able to remove one of them.
Is this something of a bug?

[Ted S]

Shouldn't be possible... Perhaps it was the same thread? Let me know if it happens again.