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.

[biocyberman]

Hello Ted_S,
Sorry for my late reply. I check the addon found several points I would like to discuss:

1. Harmonization of Yes/No rating and ten-point rating is still buggy. "Yes" in Yes/No should always be equal to maximum of other numerical rating method, ie 10 in ten-point scale method. Similarly "No" equivalent to 1 in ten-point scale or the lowest score.
This is because currently Yes equals to 1 and when switching to 10 point scale it became the lowest score!

2. It will be nice if there is user-selected sorting link for each column of the table in helpfulanwsers.php page. So users can sort to see ascendingly and descendingly

3. A function for on-site auditing of rating like in postthank mod would be nice: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=165673
where specified groups can remove ratings.

4. At user profile page, additional report about sum score earned from posts will be more informative beside average earned score .

5. And finally and most importantly: Last time I discussed about putting some filtering system at the thread level. Now I think we can achieve this without code modifying and little or no template modifying. We can do that by submiting different filtering parameters at helpfulanswers.php like following:

hepfulanswers.php?forumid=3&threadid=12&userid=15& minimumpoints=6&showtopx=15&sortby=<column>

And provide link at different hook positions such as thread tool, "Search in this forum" like this search forum specific unanswered threads does:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=201048

My understanding about vbulletin API is still limited so I will not be helpful in coding at this moment. Sorry for that :">

Thanks for your work!

Regards,
Cyberman.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by biocyberman

1. Harmonization of Yes/No rating and ten-point rating is still buggy. "Yes" in Yes/No should always be equal to maximum of other numerical rating method, ie 10 in ten-point scale method. Similarly "No" equivalent to 1 in ten-point scale or the lowest score.
This is because currently Yes equals to 1 and when switching to 10 point scale it became the lowest score!

I didn't feel it was fair to say a Yes 1 was a 10 or a No was a 0 (versus a 5 or a 4). To adjust things there is a query in the install file that will reset all old vots if you switch systems.

[quote=biocyberman;1751690]
2. It will be nice if there is user-selected sorting link for each column of the table in helpfulanwsers.php page. So users can sort to see ascendingly and descendingly
[/code]

This will be in a future release.

Originally Posted by biocyberman

3. A function for on-site auditing of rating like in postthank mod would be nice: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=165673
where specified groups can remove ratings.

At this point all of the editing is through the admin control panel. If there's interest in moving it to mod control panel we can do that in the future.

Originally Posted by biocyberman

4. At user profile page, additional report about sum score earned from posts will be more informative beside average earned score .

Such as?

Originally Posted by biocyberman

5. And finally and most importantly: Last time I discussed about putting some filtering system at the thread level. Now I think we can achieve this without code modifying and little or no template modifying. We can do that by submiting different filtering parameters at helpfulanswers.php like following:

Not sure what you mean here... What do you hope to achive?

[Ted S]

Hello Helpful Answers users!

Version 1.5.3 has been released which adds two new features:

First you will now have the option to disable ratings in the first post of a thread as they are often questions and rating does not make sense.

Secondly thanks to contributions by two Maidos and Simon Lloyd I've added thumbs up & down AND positive or negative rating images. By default the thumbs icons will now be used but you can change back to text through your options settings.

To upgrade:

Simply upload the files in the folder upload/images/button to your site and install the new plugin file. No changes have been made to the php files.

[biocyberman]

Originally Posted by Ted S

At this point all of the editing is through the admin control panel. If there's interest in moving it to mod control panel we can do that in the future.

What I meant is to put a remove rating button/links right at each post similar to thank button does.

Such as?

For example a member A: his post number X was rated total 50, post Y was rated 80, post Z was rated 30. So in total he got 160 points. Even more, if his post Y is highest rated he may get a bonus score of 100, and in total he gets 260 points. This point can be showed in a chosen places to introduce about him.

An average score of, for example 8.5, doesn't tell much in a big forum of thousands of members because there may be many members with that similar score.

Not sure what you mean here... What do you hope to achive?

Currently helpfulanswers.php table shows statistics of ALL forums. What I hope is to have function to find out helpfulanswers sub-table of a specific forum, thread or a user by putting more parameters to the query, like this one:
hepfulanswers.php?forumid=3&threadid=12&userid=15& minimumpoints=6&showtopx=15&so rtby=<column>

Link to hepfulanswers.php with different query parameter set can be but at thread and forum or search page to provide a user-friendly way to retrieve information.

Hope I spoke out what I want

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by biocyberman

What I meant is to put a remove rating button/links right at each post similar to thank button does.

For what end... To let a user remove their own ranking? To remove all rankings? To remove one ranking?

Originally Posted by biocyberman

For example a member A: his post number X was rated total 50, post Y was rated 80, post Z was rated 30. So in total he got 160 points. Even more, if his post Y is highest rated he may get a bonus score of 100, and in total he gets 260 points. This point can be showed in a chosen places to introduce about him.

An average score of, for example 8.5, doesn't tell much in a big forum of thousands of members because there may be many members with that similar score.

Let me chew on this one...

Originally Posted by biocyberman

Currently helpfulanswers.php table shows statistics of ALL forums. What I hope is to have function to find out helpfulanswers sub-table of a specific forum, thread or a user by putting more parameters to the query, like this one:
hepfulanswers.php?forumid=3&threadid=12&userid=15& minimumpoints=6&showtopx=15&so rtby=<column>

Link to hepfulanswers.php with different query parameter set can be but at thread and forum or search page to provide a user-friendly way to retrieve information.

Got it! That's straight forward and something I'll add to the next major release.

[petertdavis]

Thanks Ted, works beautifully now. How do I make the "Did you find this post helpful?" not be bolded?

[biocyberman]

Originally Posted by Ted S

For what end... To let a user remove their own ranking? To remove all rankings? To remove one ranking?

User remove their own rating, specified moderator groups can remove all ratings for a post when view that post.

Let me chew on this one...



Got it! That's straight forward and something I'll add to the next major release.

Really happy and look forward to it

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by petertdavis

Thanks Ted, works beautifully now. How do I make the "Did you find this post helpful?" not be bolded?

Just edit the template helpful_answers and remove the strong tag.

[petertdavis]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Just edit the template helpful_answers and remove the strong tag.

Nope, didn't do it. "Did you find this post helpful? Yes I did!" is still bolded.

[DobieGillis?]

Nice Update!