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.

[furnival]

This is a great mod. It looks like you're looking for feature suggestions so if you'll permit me......I'm using this on a very active board and there's 2 features that would help me:
1) Users should be able to retract the ratings they gave somehow
2) It would be great if there was an option to make negative reporting anonymous

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by furnival

This is a great mod. It looks like you're looking for feature suggestions so if you'll permit me......I'm using this on a very active board and there's 2 features that would help me:
1) Users should be able to retract the ratings they gave somehow
2) It would be great if there was an option to make negative reporting anonymous

#1 is pretty much for sure on the list.

#2 not sure what you mean? the votes don't list who did them?

[furnival]

Originally Posted by Ted S

#1 is pretty much for sure on the list.

#2 not sure what you mean? the votes don't list who did them?

Regarding #1: great! Can't wait
Regarding #2: yes, I can see my suggestion wasn't clear but that is exactly what I mean. It's just that some of my users have expressed reluctance to give any more negative ratings because the users they have previously given negative ratings to have sometimes taken it very personally and even started vendettas against them.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by furnival

Regarding #2: yes, I can see my suggestion wasn't clear but that is exactly what I mean. It's just that some of my users have expressed reluctance to give any more negative ratings because the users they have previously given negative ratings to have sometimes taken it very personally and even started vendettas against them.

How are they discovering who rated the thread negatively?

[Greek76]

Originally Posted by Ted S

I see that post but am just not following your point given how long it's been...

The update to 2.0.6 takes the version of helpfulanswers.php from 2.0.5 and fixes one bug. That is the only change.

So all we need to upload is th helpfulanswers.php file?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Greek76

So all we need to upload is th helpfulanswers.php file?

Yes.

[Ted S]

HA regular users. I made a post in another thread from a user asking about the support / innovation behind my mods and it seemed relevant here as well. As always my goal is to help the community but be honest about what I provide, please keep the feature ideas & comments coming... they are all welcome.

I've gotten out of the habit of mentioning this lately, but since your question brings it up, I should reiterate a little wisdom on my mods.

I'm a marketer before a programmer and my mods, while now many years old, stemmed from making experience improvements to drive up registrations and activity. The idea was to share relatively portable solutions that my startup, and later on my client's sites, had success with. But while it's tempting to just download and install what you see, websites thrive when they are driven relative to their userbase. As such I have the high hopes that no one just uses my mods out of the box... whether it's extending the features or customizing the messaging, generic is never the ideal solution.

These days forums are taking a back seat to the social networks of the world and that's a function of our own creation. One can point fingers as the software vendor and while there's fault there, ultimately as community owners we should be ideating as much, if not more, for ourselves and as a community of communities. The more we innovate in sharing, interaction, and even integration with networks, the more opportunity we have.

While I'm not the active contributor to this community that I was 7 or 8 years ago, I'm supportive of those looking to build and grow their sites. So if you need a little help, by all means ask, but if you want to do something novel, that's when I get really interested.

[furnival]

Originally Posted by Ted S

How are they discovering who rated the thread negatively?

It's about their post being rated negatively, not their thread. They are discovering who rated their post negatively in the normal way.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by furnival

It's about their post being rated negatively, not their thread. They are discovering who rated their post negatively in the normal way.

The negative rating in helpful answers can be turned off, however, helpful answers doesn't publicly deliver who found it unhelpful, those ratings must be coming from your own rep system.

[furnival]

Here's how it works on my forum, and I thought how it worked on everyone's.
User A gives user B a helpful post rating (either good or bad)
User A gets a notification that they have a new helpful post rating. Clicking on the link in the drop down notifications menu takes them to this page:
profile.php?do=helpfulans
at which point they can see in the right-hand column who gave them the answer and whether it's good or bad.