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 petertdavis

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

If you have more than one template style you may need to change each instance.

[Capper5016]

Really nicely done. I am sure I'm not alone in thanking you for your time and effort on this.

Okay........here is my idea, and I need some input. I'd like to replace "1 out of 1 users has found this post helpful" with something like:

(Thumbs Up img): positive votes (Thumbs Down img): negative votes

[petertdavis]

Got it working at Coin Talk. Kind of a different spin on it, but it works beautifully for what we wanted to do. Thanks very much for doing this Ted.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Capper5016

Really nicely done. I am sure I'm not alone in thanking you for your time and effort on this.


Okay........here is my idea, and I need some input. I'd like to replace "1 out of 1 users has found this post helpful" with something like:

(Thumbs Up img): positive votes (Thumbs Down img): negative votes

No need to wait for an update... Just changing the template will let you to exactly this.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by petertdavis

Got it working at Coin Talk. Kind of a different spin on it, but it works beautifully for what we wanted to do. Thanks very much for doing this Ted.

Glad it worked so well for you.

[maidos]

thanks for the update ted, much appreciated.
But it appears that you have the imagepath little bit wrong. My picture are in png and not gif.

A suggestion, is it possible to have the pictures remain there when you vote and allow the user to withdraw their vote?

Also wondering a feature i find it more appealing is like digg and other social sites is that they just show the number of votes instead of having a long sentence like this mods
1 out of 1 members found this post helpful. Thank you for rating this post!

[maidos]

took screenshot from digg for what i think will look nicer if this mods got the same vote display aswell

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by maidos

took screenshot from digg for what i think will look nicer if this mods got the same vote display aswell

Just edit the template and you can clone this easily.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by maidos

thanks for the update ted, much appreciated.
But it appears that you have the imagepath little bit wrong. My picture are in png and not gif.

A suggestion, is it possible to have the pictures remain there when you vote and allow the user to withdraw their vote?

Also wondering a feature i find it more appealing is like digg and other social sites is that they just show the number of votes instead of having a long sentence like this mods
1 out of 1 members found this post helpful. Thank you for rating this post!

I'll check the paths, thanks.

Right now there is no "unvoting".

Text can be shortened through phrases or the template.

[maidos]

thanks but i dont think only template edits will suffice
after the voting it usually displays
1 out of 1 members found this post helpful. Thank you for rating this post!

So im not entirely sure how i can do the template edits since i think the voting system isnt same as digg voting feature.
on digg if theres an exmaple +6 votes and one votes negative it goes down to +5 thats the kind of feature i would look forward with but not sure how i can do that with template edits

on language phrase theres this {1} out of {2} which shows the votes but i wish to have it appear on user before they vote so they can see the vote first before theyself vote. but how can that be done

and how do i add the image path next to members found this post helpful. right when you vote because im unabled to add the image path btw this code <phrase 1="$post[goodrank]" 2="$post[totalrank]">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_x_out_of_y]</phrase>