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.

[Chris8]

Nice mod
I have a question, is it possible to sort posts within a thread accordingly to the post ranking? (Yup, I dig the whole thread but did not find it.)
And if yes then how?
I would be grateful for any pointers.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Chris8

Nice mod
I have a question, is it possible to sort posts within a thread accordingly to the post ranking? (Yup, I dig the whole thread but did not find it.)
And if yes then how?
I would be grateful for any pointers.

Yes it's possible. No it's not a feature in the mod.

Basically you'd need to modify the query that pulls the posts up and change it to check on the votes for the post (they're stored as individual records and for the post overall).

There's already a query plugin used on that page so it's got a starting point if you're familiar with vB.

[Chris8]

Well, I'm familiar with vb in some way, but I'm not a coder. As for modifying I would only like to execute sorting only on demand, not by default. I guess I need to edit showthread template and put there a link that will run the sorting query when user clicks it. To create the query I must add a plugin and place it somewhere within showthread perhaps showthread_start hook or maybe showthread_query_postids hook would be suitable.
But the question is how would look like the code executing this query. I've just thought that perhaps someone has done it before and wouldn't mind to share the code. I think that feature could be very powerful addition to this mod.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Chris8

Well, I'm familiar with vb in some way, but I'm not a coder. As for modifying I would only like to execute sorting only on demand, not by default. I guess I need to edit showthread template and put there a link that will run the sorting query when user clicks it. To create the query I must add a plugin and place it somewhere within showthread perhaps showthread_start hook or maybe showthread_query_postids hook would be suitable.
But the question is how would look like the code executing this query. I've just thought that perhaps someone has done it before and wouldn't mind to share the code. I think that feature could be very powerful addition to this mod.

While there's plugin hooks you can use to setup the option, what you want to do requires an source change to the query -- people hate those which is the only reason why it's not a part of the mod.

Here's the basics of what you need to do:

1. Add a plugin hook for showthread_post_start along the lines of

// get the variable to see if the user wants to sort by votes
$vbulletin->input->clean_gpc('r', 'sortvotes', TYPE_STR);

// see if the user opted to sort by the post votes AND voting is enabled in this forum
if($vbulletin->GPC['sortvotes'] AND $forum['helpfulanswerbits']){
    $sortquery = "ORDER BY helpfulpost.totalrank DESC";
    echo "<!--sort by posts-->";

// either HA is not on or the user doesn't want to sort by it; back to default 
} else {
    $sortquery = "ORDER BY post.dateline ". $postorder;
    echo "<!--sort normally-->";
}

2. In showthread.php find ORDER BY post.dateline $postorder and replace it with $sortquery

3. Repeat this for all 3 instances of the original code

4. Add a link to the post with the variable &sortvotes=1 to enable sorting by votes

5. To check that the plugin is getting called view source the page and look for "sort by posts" or "sort normally". You can remove this once the hack works.

Note: This isn't tested so while it won't destroy any data it may throw an error and may not work if you filter a post another way, click to the next page, etc.

[Chris8]

It works but only partially. It executes the normal sorting and displays the posts, (<!--sort normally--> is displayed too)
but when trying to sort by helpfulpost.totalrank by accessing http://www.example.com/showthread.php?t=xxx&sortvotes=1 a db error occurs.



I'm trying to guess what might be wrong. Thank you anyway for taking your time to write such detailed instructions, that's for sure the good starting point and it would probably work but some detail is missing.
I will try to test it tomorrow on clean installation.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Chris8

I'm trying to guess what might be wrong. Thank you anyway for taking your time to write such detailed instructions, that's for sure the good starting point and it would probably work but some detail is missing.
I will try to test it tomorrow on clean installation.

You can try adding back ORDER BY post.dateline $postorder to the first instance although I'm not sure how that will impact the ordering.

Alternatively you'd need to add the JOIN request to that query as well.

[Chris8]

Yes! It works now like a charm! Thank you!
So simple though I wouldn't figure it myself.
Absolutely precious feature, at least for me.

[eternal_]

Is there something like this for 4.x.x? I'm looking for a thumbs up option. It should be standard in vbulletin by now. It's a popular feature all over the web.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by eternal_

Is there something like this for 4.x.x? I'm looking for a thumbs up option. It should be standard in vbulletin by now. It's a popular feature all over the web.

Yes of course there is, have you tried searching? or simply just clicking the coders name and view their profile?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by eternal_

Is there something like this for 4.x.x? I'm looking for a thumbs up option. It should be standard in vbulletin by now. It's a popular feature all over the web.

You mean like the 4.x version of this mod posted in the 4.x section of this forum?