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.

[guvner]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Are you sure the addon is (1) enabled for the forum with the postbit style and (2) not your own post?

Yes , quite.

I'm running it in my hidden management forum. When I select the style with postbit legacy it shows - when I switch styles to the one using standard postbit it disappears. This confirms that it's switched on and working just fine - just not with one of the templates.

Give me a few secs and I'll post 2 screenies of the same post in the same forum . . .

[Ted S]

Ok, I reviewed the code you posted before and this is strange. While you have the HR tag I don't see the DIV tag that wraps the entire element (it should be <div id="helpfulanswers_box_ ... >). Does that appear?

[guvner]

OK - 2 screenies - same post.

1. Postbit
2. Postbit legacy

I know that it won't provide any clues - just to confirm that the forum's been correctly selected and that the mod is working.

[guvner]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Ok, I reviewed the code you posted before and this is strange. While you have the HR tag I don't see the DIV tag that wraps the entire element (it should be <div id="helpfulanswers_box_ ... >). Does that appear?

In the template that's working (legacy) yes it does:

		<div id="helpfulanswers_box_237366">
		
			<br /><hr size="1" style="color:#D1D1E1" />
					
			
			1 out of 1 members found this post helpful.
				
			
			</div>

But in the postbit template page source it doesn't appear.

[Ted S]

Well that makes even less sense. Revert the template helpful_answers in that style and be sure it starts with:

<if condition="$show['helpfulanswer']">
		
		<div id="helpfulanswers_box_$post[postid]">

[guvner]

Revert wasn't an option so I guess it's still original - and I confirm it starts as you describe.

[guvner]

I've just re-installed and overwritten (just in case) and no change.

[Ted S]

I'm sorry to keep making you work on this but I can't duplicate on any of my test sites.

Can you edit the template helpful_answers and change the <hr> line (add some random text) and see if that shows up when you view?

[guvner]

Think I'm getting somewhere - I'll get back to in a few

Thanks for your patience

[guvner]

All fixed Ted - I can't really tell you what the problem was but I reverted the faulty template, added back my hacks and then re9nstalled your mod and all's well.

Thanks for your assistance.

One more question - once someone clicks that the post was helpful, is there an easy way to have the cell background change color to highlight it?

Mike