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.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by New Joe

I get this error:

New Joe, you need to ask your host to recomapile Apache with cURL enabled or simply turn off the reporting as per the instructions.

[biggazillakilla]

Ted, I'm having some trouble, and I'm trying to figure out what's gone wrong. I'm a bit confused at first because the 2.0.5 file install.html says:

This article and its associated code was updated on July 16, 2009

Version: 1.9.0
vB Version: 3.7/3.8

Also, the ZIP contains two folders. They're not exactly the same, so I'm not sure which to install.

I'm going to try from the beginning to see whether that fixes my problems.

And thanks for your mods over the years. I've used several of them and am very thankful.

Here's the error message I'm receiving:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array in [path]/includes/class_bootstrap.php(1146) : eval()'d code on line 86

Warning: fetch_template() calls should be replaced by the vB_Template class. Template name: helpful_answers in [path]/includes/functions.php on line 3932

Warning: fetch_template() calls should be replaced by the vB_Template class. Template name: helpful_answers in [path]/includes/functions.php on line 3932

Warning: fetch_template() calls should be replaced by the vB_Template class. Template name: helpful_answers in [path]/includes/functions.php on line 3932

Warning: fetch_template() calls should be replaced by the vB_Template class. Template name: helpful_answers in [path]/includes/functions.php on line 3932

Warning: fetch_template() calls should be replaced by the vB_Template class. Template name: helpfulanswers_javascript in [path]/includes/functions.php on line 3932

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/mysite/public_html/forums/showthread.php(2176) : eval()'d code(3) : eval()'d code on line 3

If it helps, I always rename my admin control panel from admincp to something else.

Thanks again.

[Alex Dumitru]

I'm having the same problem. I'm using version 4.0.8 and I've tried both 1.9.5 and 2.0.5

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Alex Dumitru

I'm having the same problem. I'm using version 4.0.8 and I've tried both 1.9.5 and 2.0.5

This mod is for 3.8... you need the 4.0.x version

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by biggazillakilla

Ted, I'm having some trouble, and I'm trying to figure out what's gone wrong. I'm a bit confused at first because the 2.0.5 file install.html says:Also, the ZIP contains two folders. They're not exactly the same, so I'm not sure which to install.

I'm going to try from the beginning to see whether that fixes my problems.

And thanks for your mods over the years. I've used several of them and am very thankful.

Here's the error message I'm receiving:If it helps, I always rename my admin control panel from admincp to something else.

Thanks again.

You need to use the 4.0.x version on 4.x...

[biggazillakilla]

Originally Posted by Ted S

You need to use the 4.0.x version on 4.x...

Embarrassing. Thanks, Ted. I've installed the right version. (I think I've had this mod tagged for a couple of years.)

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by biggazillakilla

Embarrassing. Thanks, Ted. I've installed the right version. (I think I've had this mod tagged for a couple of years.)

No worries!

[bada_bing]

How can I correct this issue that when members clicks the "Members of mysite have rated post as the most helpful. Skip right to it!" get redirected to a white page that says "Page not found"

They url they get redirected to is http://www.mysite.com/forums/-post.html

I am running vbseo which I am assuming this is the cause but not sure how to fix it.

[BR_Advocate]

Bump.

Ted, any ideas? Unless, someone can help me figure this out, I'll need to uninstall. It is useless for me as is.

This may be related, we ran the scripts:

UPDATE post SET goodrank = '', totalrank = '';
DELETE FROM helpfulanswer;

And it returned the following:

An error occurred while attempting to execute your query. The following information was returned.
error number: 1054
error desc: Unknown column 'goodrank' in 'field list'

Again, any ideas? Thanks.

Originally Posted by BR_Advocate

Sorry if this has already been answered, but I have been searching for a couple of hours now, and d cannot find anything similar to my issue. My Most Helpful Answers page is giving strange results:

Attachment 123273

I am using the 10-point system.

Any ideas?

[Simon Lloyd]

Use the tools provided at the bottom of this post https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....65&postcount=2 depending on the version you are using.