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]

Originally Posted by 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:



And:

Which script did you run to get this error?

[basketmen]

guys, is there version for vbulletin 3.6 for this hack

i had try to install but get this when importing

The following dependencies were not met:
This product is not compatible with version 3.6.8 of vBulletin. (Compatible starting with 3.7.0)

[Ted S]

You can edit the modification to install on 3.6 but it is not supported against the 3.6 code although it should work just fine.

[Ted S]

Hello Helpful Answers users. Today I am please to announce 2.0.0 which is a big number that includes a big feature long asked for (although the actual changes are rather small).

2.0 introduces user level stats on good votes, totalvotes and bad votes which you can put right into the postbit template using $post[hagoodrank] $post[hatotalrank] and $post[habadrank]

These stats combine a user's entire post history (votes on their posts) into simple numbers for your use.

Updating to 2.0 may take a few minutes as old votes are converted into the user profile. To reduce queries the user table is extended to offer both a good and total rank field.

2.0 requires uploading all .php files as well as updating the XML plugin and to use the new variables you will need to edit your postbit template as you see fit.

[viper357]

Originally Posted by Ted S

You can edit the modification to install on 3.6 but it is not supported against the 3.6 code although it should work just fine.

Does this still apply to 2.0.0 on 3.6.12? I haven't installed it yet.

[viper357]

Ok, I've got it installed and running on 3.6.12 but it's only showing on the first post, any idea why?

edit: If you view the full thread then it only shows in the first post, but if you click on the individual post number (to show only that post - showpost.php) then it shows fine, just on the showthread.php it doesn't.

edit again: It's showing on the first post of each page of a thread.

[viper357]

I've tried playing around with it by putting it in different places, it will show up wherever I put it but still only in the first post. I have tried the manual option as well.

I have disabled all of my other hacks 5 at a time but that made no difference.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by viper357

Does this still apply to 2.0.0 on 3.6.12? I haven't installed it yet.

Yes. 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 are all fairly similar and I can't think of anything that would break in this mod. However as I don't have a 3.6 test site anymore I can't validate that myself.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by viper357

I've tried playing around with it by putting it in different places, it will show up wherever I put it but still only in the first post. I have tried the manual option as well.

I have disabled all of my other hacks 5 at a time but that made no difference.

Check your options... are you setting this to not appear in the first post by chance? Have you changed any other settings?

[viper357]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Check your options... are you setting this to not appear in the first post by chance? Have you changed any other settings?

If I set that to not appear then it doesn't appear, if I set it to appear in the first post then it does appear, so it is doing what it is supposed to do, but it only shows in the first post, here is a link so you can see --> http://www.marineaquariumsa.com/showthread.php?t=5238

On that link, post number 2 does not have the thumbsup, but if you click on the post number to show just the post then it suddenly appears --> http://www.marineaquariumsa.com/show...76&postcount=2

I am desperate to get this working, my members are crying for something like this