Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Allow users to rate individual posts

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 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.

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.

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.

History of this addon:

This addon was originally developed for private use in 2006 for a site of mine but after getting several past clients requested requests and messages I decided to package it up for public release.

[Ted S]

This mod integrated with a vbCredits via third party addon and the reputation system.

Is there another system you would like to integrate it with?

[TK1990]

Hello.

I changed the phrases and it shows still the same. :S

[Jah-Hools]

Hi

Can this be added on a selective per forum basis? (so not forum-wide just on some forums?)

Thanks

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Jah-Hools

Hi

Can this be added on a selective per forum basis? (so not forum-wide just on some forums?)

Thanks

Yup.

[Ted S]

After several months of testing by many users I have released 1.9.5 which is a large update to the Helpful Answers system.

Some of the changes in this release:
- The notification system can now be used to tell them when someone voted on their post
- You can now display a message under the first post linking to the top rated post
- Updates to the hooks and plugin system to meet vbulletin guides
- Fixes to several small bugs
- Improved installer code
- Specific threads can be excluded or included via the admin

Note: Installing this version will rework your existing votes updating each one to include additional data. Please be mindful of this as an upgrade will take a few minutes for larger sites.

[libertylounge]

If I disable the giving of reputation in specific forums.. can this still add reputation to users overall scores?

[libertylounge]

Additionally, there's something wrong with the query you say to run if you switch between the 10 point scale and the up/down vote:

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

I get the following error:

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'

And:

An error occurred while attempting to execute your query. The following information was returned.
error number: 1064
error desc: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'DELETE FROM helpfulanswer' at line 2

[Ted S]

Thank you. I will be sure to update this asap.

[schmidt123a]

where is usergroup permission ?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by schmidt123a

where is usergroup permission ?

Looks like you double posted this, please check the other thread and stick to one thread so I don't end up trying to answer you twice. Thanks.