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]

Attached is a simple import script which will import voting history from the Thank You Post system into Helpful Answers updating the voting log and each post.

To use this script simply upload the file to your admincp folder, login to your admincp and manually enter the url (i.e. www.yoursite.com/admincp/ha_import.php). Once you've finished the script delete the file and DO NOT rerun it or you'll end up with duplicate votes.

A few important notes about the script:

- This script will add an entry into the log for each thank you vote prohibiting the user who said "thanks" from voting again.
- This script will maintain existing helpful answer votes and will allow duplicates if a user has used both systems in the past.
- This script treats every Thank You as a helpful rating and does not look for negativs.
- Your Thank You Post votes will be left as is in case you wish to run both systems or for back.
- This script is not fully tested so use at your own risk.

Of course if you are not using the Thank You Post addon there is no reason to run this script and doing so will give you an error.

[maidos]

any advice how i can do that and exactly which phrase to remove and replace with my own image path.

Im not fully understand you by switching to manual mode exactly what do youmean

also i pm u the double icons that appears randomely any help on that? i followed the sample codes u posted earlier on

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by maidos

any advice how i can do that and exactly which phrase to remove and replace with my own image path.

No phrases for this, you'll want to edit the template helpful_answersFind $helpfulanswer_yes and $helpfulanswer_no and replace them with your yes and no images (i.e. <img src="../yes.gif" width="20" height="20" border="0" alt="Yes!" />

Originally Posted by maidos

Im not fully understand you by switching to manual mode exactly what do youmean

In the Helpful Answers Settings there's an option to disable the auto template inclusion. Turn that off and the $helpful_answers variable gets activated for you to place where you want.

[maidos]

thanks it helped me, my another question is
can i use this <if condition="$post['totalrank']"> to display the votes that appears before voting by only showing the votes and not the images?

imkind of confused why the images doesnt display on some replies and other replies does in the same thread
and some threads it appears double icons

[Ted S]

<if condition="$post['totalrank']"> is a condition that will check to see if their are votes. If you use that to wrap around your voting buttons they would never show as there could never be a vote.

[maidos]

so could you advice me how i can show the votes for the members before user votes themself?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by maidos

so could you advice me how i can show the votes for the members before user votes themself?

Just use the goodrank and totalrank variables as you see fit. They will show the votes.

[maidos]

thanks, now i have one last issue and that is the screenshot i pmed you.

Good 1 Bad 0 Did you find this post helpful? 1 Yes | 0 Yes
the double icons appears when someone other already has voted when members themself personally havent voted yet any idea to fix this?

[Ted S]

I'm not able to follow your question. Please rephrase it.

[-=Sniper=-]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Attached is a simple import script which will import voting history from the Thank You Post system into Helpful Answers updating the voting log and each post.

To use this script simply upload the file to your admincp folder, login to your admincp and manually enter the url (i.e. www.yoursite.com/admincp/ha_import.php). Once you've finished the script delete the file and DO NOT rerun it or you'll end up with duplicate votes.

A few important notes about the script:

- This script will add an entry into the log for each thank you vote prohibiting the user who said "thanks" from voting again.
- This script will maintain existing helpful answer votes and will allow duplicates if a user has used both systems in the past.
- This script treats every Thank You as a helpful rating and does not look for negativs.
- Your Thank You Post votes will be left as is in case you wish to run both systems or for back.
- This script is not fully tested so use at your own risk.

Of course if you are not using the Thank You Post addon there is no reason to run this script and doing so will give you an error.

Thanks Ted, I can work with that