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.

[apiasto]

i am getting the same error.i will wait for stable hack

[6piston]

cool!. now you may face the next same prob as i am

[tpearl5]

hrm - I like this idea, although I've already modified the wording of the reputation system to resemble something similar.

[Ted S]

My appologies to those who have experienced bugs with the system. 3 issues were identified (2 with queries like the errors above show) and 1 in the creation of the table. An updated version has been released which solves all known issues.

[Ted S]

Note: Version 1.3.3 has been released which fixes several small issues related to creating the mySQL table for this addon and with two queries. With this update the current mysql query errors will go away and the table will be properly created.

All users are advised to upgrade while those who have experienced database errors should uninstall and then upgrade.

To upgrade simply upload the new version of helpfulanswer.php and install the new plugin file.

[apiasto]

awesome man working great ,i am putting this for MOTM,good work thanks.can you add 1 option like if i wanna allow it only for first post?and to show total amount of ranks a user recieved in postbit,thanks

[6piston]

yup now it works beautifully

please expand this mod as much as you can!! it's great

[tpearl5]

Ted - would you consider adding functionality to add to a users reputation and points for vbplaza?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Ted - would you consider adding functionality to add to a users reputation and points for vbplaza?

can you explain this a bit more?

[Quantnet]

suggestion:
Instead of manually enable forum by forum, consider having the options in setting control to enable a group of forums.
for example:
Enable (Forum ID) : 1,3,4,5
Disable: 2,6,8