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.

[Ted S]

Strange but glad it works.

You can use a conditional to highlight good posts. I'll put sample code up in a bit.

[guvner]

Hi Ted,

I'd like to add my voice to a couple of previous suggestions as well.

1. I think this mod would be perfect if it hooked into the rep. points system - but in a simple manner. I'd like to see it be able to award a point(s) for a good suggestion, but I couldn't use it to subtract points - IMHO that would be too harsh to penalize someone for providing an answer that didn't quite work out.

2. I also agree with a previous poster that the mod's options page needs to have a cell which allows us to add a comma separated listing of applicable forums (or the reverse - a list of excluded forums). In my particular setup, I have 78 forums and sub-forums - all but 6 of them needed the mod to be activated. It took me a long time last night to set them all up - granted that was mostly down to browser refresh speeds, but being able to deal with all forums in one go would be sweet.

3. I'm also hoping that your sample (or future) code will include the ability to add a line in the postbit somewhere under the avatar which lists how many helpful posts a member has made? A little like the current "thank you" mod does - i.e. "Thanked 396 times in 329 posts"

4. In helpfulanswers.php, when the link is clicked, I'd like to see it go to the post in question, but in full thread view (for context) instead of just the single post view.

Hope these suggestions are useful because for forums like mine, this is going to be a very popular mod - I've already nominated it for MOTM.

Thanks,
Mike

[Ted S]

Thanks mike. All good ideas that will all be making it into the addon (the first 3 sooner). That said the detail on how you want it to work is awesome. Thanks.

[apiasto]

thnx for the update,will it be the same process or just the xml with overwrite?

[Ted S]

For upgrades you should reupload the php file and install the new plugin. If an update is plugin only I'll generally announce it as such. Thanks for asking!

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

How about a positive point (or points, you'd set the scale) for each vote they get [negative for a negative vote].

Reputation points? yeh, that would be great!

Originally Posted by Ted S

I'm not sure the post should impact the thread rating... you could have a great post with a few bad ratings. We could however do a new column: average post and show the ratings of those?

Maybe just the first thread should impact the rating? If there's an individual post within a thread that is getting a lot of good ratings then it should probably be in its own thread anyway.

Originally Posted by Ted S

I'm not familiar with this system; is this AND the rep both needed?

No - if you add the reputation feature then that alone will add to their vbplaza points.

[Ted S]

I'm pleased to announce the release of version 1.4.0 which contains several major feature updates and a few bug fixes. See the complete change log below:

- (Feature) Added optional integration with the reputation system
- (Feature) Added optional variable to identify the top rated thread in template conditionals
- (Feature) Added optional statistics to a user's profile
- (Admin) Added Bulk tool to enable system in forums
- (Admin) Option to disable automatic template plugin
- (System) Add overall rank variable for template conditionals
- (System) Auto add to templates for easier installs (no more templates to edit)
- (System) Added hook locations throughout addon
- (Bug) Fixes issue where non-ajax users weren't getting votes counted
- (Bug) Don't show HR line if no votes and user cant vote

This wraps up most of the requested features on my list. If there's something you would like to see added that was not put into 1.4.0 please let me know.

And of course as a new release please report any bugs or errors you find.

[guvner]

Great stuff Ted!

A couple of questions if I may:

1. Will the upgrade revert my current helful-answers templates and/or overwrite the current phrases? I have some formatting in there I want to keep so if they do revert I'll take a copy first.

2. You mentioned earlier about some conditional examples - i.e. I wanted to add some code to the postbit in addition to the usercp feature which you've now built in - did you get a chance to look at this yet?

My users love this hack - thank you again!

Mike

[Ted S]

Thanks Mike!

Originally Posted by guvner

1. Will the upgrade revert my current helful-answers templates and/or overwrite the current phrases? I have some formatting in there I want to keep so if they do revert I'll take a copy first.

The old phrases shouldn't be overritten but the template might depending on the version you used (no changes in 1.4 but there were before) so back that up.

2. You mentioned earlier about some conditional examples - i.e. I wanted to add some code to the postbit in addition to the usercp feature which you've now built in - did you get a chance to look at this yet?

I'm building some more examples tonight, if you tell me what you're trying to do I can start with that example...

[guvner]

Sounds good - I'd like to add a line to the postbit which is along the lines of what the "thank you" mod provides. similar to:

"Thanked 396 times in 329 posts"

I guess we could adjust the phrase ourselves in the conditional, but perhaps something like:

"Has provided xx helpful answers in the last yy days"

Maybe the "yy days" is a stretch and could add too many extra queries, but just a thought . . .