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.

[TimberFloorAu]

< must be the thickest fella on the planet.

Where can our users see the list of feedback Ted ?

Perhaps I have missed something , vitally obvious.

Ste

[Ted S]

Oh! Now I get your question... Wow my bad on that one big time!

www.yoursite.com/helpfulanswers.php

The list is an admin option so be sure it's properly setup or you'll get an error.

[TimberFloorAu]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Oh! Now I get your question... Wow my bad on that one big time!

www.yoursite.com/helpfulanswers.php

The list is an admin option so be sure it's properly setup or you'll get an error.

Thanks Ted !!!!

Please could you give me the relevant code in <dd><a href="helpfulanswers.php">Helpful Answers</a></dd> so that when a link is clicked it opens in target="_blank" please

Ste

[Ted S]

You already have the code... target="_blank" is what you need to add to the link (i.e. <a href="X" target="_blank">

[TalkPhotography]

Is there any way to enable this for only certain forums, or even better, only certain threads? (Long shot I know...we are looking for a 'post voting' system for our competition threads, and the basics of what this does is the closest we can find).

Thanks

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TalkPhotography

Is there any way to enable this for only certain forums, or even better, only certain threads? (Long shot I know...we are looking for a 'post voting' system for our competition threads, and the basics of what this does is the closest we can find).

Thanks

Certain forums absoltely (this mod doesn't appear anywhere into you enable it in a forum).

Certain threads, not by default but you could customize it very easily to do so.

[vbuser99]

I have just installed 1.4.2 version.

Have a few questions:

1. Is "Ban User from Getting Thanks" a working feature? I could't make it work, userid still can get Thanks!

2. In the file headers I see old version labels, is zip file updated correctly? These are from 1.4.2 zip file:

// Hepful Answers AJAX Code -- Version 1.3.0
|| # Helpful Answers Rating Script version 1.4.0
|| # Helpful Answers Admin Script version 1.4.0

Thanks in advance!

[TimberFloorAu]

Originally Posted by Ted S

You already have the code... target="_blank" is what you need to add to the link (i.e. <a href="X" target="_blank">

Cross purposes again.

I said WITHIN that php file.

Not to that php file.

So each itemised thread that has received pos/neg feedback listed chronologically. Should open in a new window, because it opens to self at the moment.

As its your mod, i dont wish to open up the code and re do it, without permission.

I am presuming its something very simple within the prodcut xml

such as:

<if condition="$show['rate_helpfulanswer']">
					<strong>$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_didyoufind] <a href="./helpfulanswers.php?postid=$post[postid]&rank=1">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_yesidid]</a></strong>
				</if>

changed to

<if condition="$show['rate_helpfulanswer']">
					<strong>$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_didyoufind] <a href="./helpfulanswers.php?postid=$post[postid]&rank=1" target="_blank">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_yesidid]</a></strong>
				</if>

[biocyberman]

Originally Posted by Ted S

The binary ratings are the purpose of this feature; stars or a 5 or 10 point scale was not the idea behind the addon. This addon is meant to show the utility of a post much like how Yahoo Answers or any of the thousands of other Q&A style forums work. A user is asked what posts they like or dislike showing an aggregate rating of how many people found it helpful.

It sounds like the issue isn't about satisfactory rating options but rather about a mismatch in what you're looking to do and what this is intended to do.

While I would love to accommodate and build this option in so both were possible what you're looking for is simply a different addon. Not that I don't like the idea but simply that merging the two systems together would basically mean adding a lot of bad overhead to each that just isn't needed.

Gutting this hack and putting in just a star or 10 point system would seem a lot more logical to me to get your intended functionality.

Thanks for your time and your discussion, Ted_S.
Yes you are right. I am looking for a different rating system, which I think hasn't been made yet.
I have been searching and trying several Mods to satisfy following feature but haven't got one:

1. Let reader answer the question: "How helpful do you think of this post?" by giving more informative and qualitative answer rather than "yes" or "no".
2. Add quick search in thread tool to sort posts in a thread according to their sum of score. Add link in member search or forum-wide search to sort members according to their sum of score got in whole forums or a specific forum.
3. Rating moderation by staff members

That's is my dream. The mod actually does above features will do some thing. There will be no need for "post thank you hack", "post groan hack", "post rating system hack", and your
"Helpful answer" hack (sorry). And I am sure a lot of vb forums are using one of these hacks. So a more complete handling would be to have conversion tools for forums using those hack into this "unified" post rating system Upon score from this system, member prestige is more rational.
Nonetheless your mod is the closest one to have potential to fulfill mentioned features.

[GriZzm0]

@ The one who said the "Add Product" page never stopped loading.
I had the same problem. Our MySQL user didn't have the alter privilege which caused this to happen.

@ Modification author.
Great product, thanks.

Found a small error tho. On the showpost.php page you see the "Did you find this post helpful? Yes | No" text even tho you've already clicked on one of those before. This does not happen on the showthread.php page.