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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by vbuser99

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

Strange. I'll have to add it to the to test list. It did work when I tried it initially.

Originally Posted by vbuser99

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

That's fine. I really shouldn't even have versions in their as I don't change them for minor updates (sometimes the code changed is quicker than finding all the version numbers).

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by 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.

@GriZzm0 Thanks. (wanted to RT one of the lines but couldn't pick one...)

I'll be sure to look at that bug before 1.4.3

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by biocyberman

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.

Not a bad dream if I do say so myself.

A few comments to you because you should understand what you want, it helps in getting it.


Let reader answer the question. Not difficult to do, heck you could extend this mod to do it fairly easily... Right now I have a column for goodvotes, totalvotes with each post. All you'd need to do is change the rating from 1 point for each to 10 possible. Change the script to record the number value and change the votes table to hold the individual score. Divide the goodscore by the totalvotes and you get an average.

It's not as insane is it sounds.

Add quick search in thread tool to sort posts. Unfortunately there's no hooks in the queries so that means code edits. Users hate code edits so coders hate making hacks with them.

sort members according to their sum of score. Not simple code but not that difficult either. The main issue here is the overhead as you try to break things out (i.e. top user with threads in a category).

Rating moderation by staff members. I'm a huge fan of this myself but haven't figured out a good way to do it in forums. With review scripts (i.e. product reviews) you can do "staff review" but for a post you'd either have to have comments on the post (which doesn't make a ton of sense when the user can just post back) or denote that a staff member ranked it on a star scale.

I wanted to make the post order hack but the code edits stopped that. But I am up for diving into the first and the last feature requests if there's more interest.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TimberFloorAu

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

Your code is right but there's no need to change the product file. What you are editing is in a template and you can customize that template however you like... Customizations aren't just allowed, they're encouraged (seriously).

[TimberFloorAu]

Cheers Ted.

Ste :up:

Ok have looked in templates: not getting very far, as the page is propogated by:

<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_post]</td>
<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_good]</td>
<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_total]</td>

Not sure on where in the postlink we can add target="_blank"

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TimberFloorAu

Cheers Ted.

Ste :up:

Ok have looked in templates: not getting very far, as the page is propogated by:

<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_post]</td>
<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_good]</td>
<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_total]</td>

Not sure on where in the postlink we can add target="_blank"

Wrong template. You need the bit one, that's the header row that shows the column titles.

[Ted S]

Based on comments from a few members (and mainly biocyberman) I've added a second rating option to the script. This option allows for posts to be voted on from 1 to 10 rather than just being marked as "helpful or not helpful".

The ten point scale is an optional feature which is enabled globally (either you use one or the other). There are a few features that won't work with the ten point scale including the profile stats, the no negative option and others. However there are also some new features with the ten point scale.

I encourage you to try this out on a test site (or your live site if you're looking to switch over) and give me your feedback.

To remove all previous votes (required if changing methods) run the queries:

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

If you use table prefixes be sure to include that as well.

Note: This is in beta and while it works fine on my system I'm leaving 1.4.2 as the official version until I get some feedback on how this works.

Second Note: To get this done I used numbers (1 2 3 4 5....) for rankings rather than stars. I will be looking into adding a simple star image in the future and encourage suggestions on that image.

[Ted S]

Changes in 1.5.0
- (Feature) Addition of ten-point rating scale (optional)
- (Feature) Addition of profile stats for ten-point rating scale
- (Feature) Modified display of top ratings page for ten-point ratings
- (Bug) Rating's still show up in showpost template after user has voted
- (Bug) Individual user can't be banned

[Hateman]

Hi,

how can i activate it for all forusm via sql?

[GriZzm0]

Originally Posted by Hateman

Hi,

how can i activate it for all forusm via sql?

Use the bulk tool in the admin cp instead.