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]

Version 1.6.5 beta has been released. This is a bug update fixing a few issues with the beta.

- Fixes column sorting to the top helpful answers page
- Fixes searching the top helpful answers page
- Adds up/down sorting options the top helpful answers page
- Adds multiple pages to the top helpful answers page

This is still marked as beta although there's been more usage and I'm close to marking a stable release. For those of you not using the beta my appologies that the "updated" flag is being triggered... vBulletin.org does that every time a new zip file is uploaded.

[nascartr]

Ok, installed the new beta. Where should the page links be on the search results page?

http://diecastcrazy.com/community/helpfulanswers.php

[Ted S]

Sorry, didn't upload the right file. Please use 1.6.6 and you'll see the tabulation at the end of the page (see www.divematrix.com/helpfulanswers.php for example).

For anyone running the beta version who has not already resynced their votes there was an error with my upgrade script which may have caused you to lose your vote history. Please run the attached ha_revote.php script from your admincp folder which will recreate vote summaries for each post using raw vote counts. If you notice anything wrong with your vote summaries as shown in posts and the helpful answers page please let me know.

[nascartr]

Ok, that worked! It deleted my votes again but I just ran the php file you posted yesterday. Thanks again for this great modification!

Glad the search page now shows the most rated at the top instead of least.

[Ted S]

Ya. I noticed that when i was building in the page sorting and clearly fixed it right away.

The migration to the external post file has definitely been a pain but for the long haul it's a much better solution for sites in keeping alterations to the original vbulletin tables to a minimum and in optimizing load for larger sites.

Looking forward to more suggestions about functions I can add that will drive more votes and visibility. Thanks!

[Spinball]

Originally Posted by Ted S

If I provided some code would you be interested in testing a version that used a seperate table for the data?

Yes I would. But I see you have already altered your core code. I think that's a much more professional approach.

One question. I would like to implement this mod into our bargain forums to be able to have a 'hot or not' type system (as seen at www.hotukdeals.com), with some kind of prominent indication of the 'hotness'... that would be heat of threads and the ability to sort by the heat of bargains. But at the same time I would like to use the thumbs up/thumbs down type of voting for replies so that threads with thousands of replies can also be sorted so that people can quickly see the most helpful ones.
Is it possible to have different voting types (i.e. essentially graphics) in different forums? And is it possible to quickly implement certain voting types into the required forums? E.g. with over 300 forums, I would like to be able to, for example, click a parent forum and specify that I want the hot or not type voting system in it and all its sub forums.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Linking the guest to a login/ please register page would be simple. Of course their vote wouldn't be counted but they would end up back at the thread to vote again.

And yes, 1.6 will work with vb 3.7.

Could this be something that is added to the next beta? I can't quite figure out how to modify things to do it myself, other than manually adding a link in there. Can guests also see the ratings if there are any?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Could this be something that is added to the next beta? I can't quite figure out how to modify things to do it myself, other than manually adding a link in there. Can guests also see the ratings if there are any?

Sure thing. I was thinking of rather than taking them straight to the register page we could jump them to a guest vote message letting them know they have to register to continue. What do you think?

And yes, guests can see votes.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Spinball

Yes I would. But I see you have already altered your core code. I think that's a much more professional approach.

What can I say... When I like an idea, I like it.

One question. I would like to implement this mod into our bargain forums to be able to have a 'hot or not' type system, with some kind of prominent indication of the 'hotness'...

So if I get you right the sum total of "good" posts would be used to determine hotness.... Or would you use the first post's rank only. First post is easier and would just require a JOIN on the existing FORUMDISPLAY page while the sum total would need some edits to the hack.

This could definitely be done although you'd have to decide how a thread is measured as hot. For example, is a thread with the most goodrankings hot or is it more than 100 good ones, 150? Etc...

A simple template conditional would show whatever graphic image you want once you sort out which data you want to use.

Is it possible to have different voting types (i.e. essentially graphics) in different forums?

Yes although the addon does not support this naively. But you could easily use a template conditional to change the images in select forums or to be more efficient and deal with larger numbers of forums, add a new option to the forums to control this.

And is it possible to quickly implement certain voting types into the required forums? E.g. with over 300 forums, I would like to be able to, for example, click a parent forum and specify that I want the hot or not type voting system in it and all its sub forums.

There's a bulk editor that allows you to enable this in all forums, certain forums, or all forums except certain forums. Nothing is in place to deal with forum hierarchy though so you can't pick 3 out of 4 top level categories or anything like that.

Sounds like an interesting feature you're working towards... Can't wait to see it in action!

[Stoebi]

Hi

What do you think about an integration for blogs and or for visitor comments??