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.

[Trip]

Just the total number of posts other members voted "yes, this post was helpful" on. I'm thinking its the same data as displayed in the member profile block. I thought it was what $helpfulposts[goodranks] displays, but I could be wrong.
IE: Username has '5' helpful posts.

Basically, I am just trying to show the information $helpfulposts[goodranks] displays in another template other than member profile.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Not sure where to start... You would need to add a few columns, possibly some calculations to the query to get all the data out, that's the fun part (figuring out what you need out). Formatting is just a matter of editing the table output.

How's your familiarity with vB4 code?

vB4? haven't touched it, it seems far too buggy to entertain it at the mo, anyway i really like the flexibility and mods that i have for vB3.8, it's took me quite a while to be comfortable messing with the templates of that

I'm not sure i follow you with the calculations, you have already done those for number of votes, all im looking to do is add the author of the post that has been marked helpful in helpfulanswers.php

I know how to show the username for the post but not picking up the post id

<if condition="$post[userid]"><a href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$post[userid]" target="_blank">$post[username]</a><else />$post[username]</if>

but we would need to pick up the id of the post that was found helpful, as for writing queries, well i'd have more success platting fog!

Do you have time to help with this? you can pm me with a quote if you like

[Simon Lloyd]

Ted, just looking at the helpful_answers_topbit template it looks as though i could just do this

<td class="alt1"><!-- phrase 1="$helpfulanswer[postid]" --><!-- $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_top] --><!-- /phrase --> <a href="./showthread.php?p=$helpfulanswer[postid]#post$helpfulanswer[postid]">$post[username]</a></td>

but, adding that doesn't show in the columns and messes the header ro of helpfulanswers.php and i cant see where to add a column other than there!

[yotsume]

Sure would be nice to have this for vbBlog. Any chance?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by yotsume

Sure would be nice to have this for vbBlog. Any chance?

Someone is welcome to extend it, I am supporting vB 3 but not adding significant features for it

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

Ted, just looking at the helpful_answers_topbit template it looks as though i could just do this

<td class="alt1"><!-- phrase 1="$helpfulanswer[postid]" --><!-- $vbphrase[helpfulanswer_top] --><!-- /phrase --> <a href="./showthread.php?p=$helpfulanswer[postid]#post$helpfulanswer[postid]">$post[username]</a></td>

but, adding that doesn't show in the columns and messes the header ro of helpfulanswers.php and i cant see where to add a column other than there!

That's the individual row, there's another template, helpful_answers which controls the page the rows display in. You can only call fields that the page has access too, new items you want to add have to be added to the helpfulanswers.php page to become part of the query

[Simon Lloyd]

Ted again thanks for the reply but beyond template edits i'm out of my depth

[symptome]

I deinstalled it. But I still have a section for helpful answer system in my admin area (menu on the left hand side). Why?
How to deinstall completely?
Thanks

[Trip]

Do you still have the helpfulanswers.php file in your admincp directory? If you do, remove it and all other files associated with the modification.

[symptome]

Thanks for the reply. It worked.