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.

[compuminus]

One other bit of feedback on an already excellent mod:

Within the "helpful answers system" menu in the admin control panel, it would be very helpful to be able to search/list the ratings based not only on who was rated and what they've rated, but also by who *has been rated* and what posts they've received ratings on. I'd think this would be straightforward to enable...

[cheesegrits]

Originally Posted by Ted S

I don't think that would accomplish the goal. You're not interested in the helpful thread button but some people are. Hence a different mod... similar code but different.

The reasons I'd like to see a Helpful Thread system based purely on the ratings of the posts are:

1) We already have Forum Ratings. It's a well known, well understood interface / concept. Replacing this with a Helpful Threads which is separate from Helpful Posts would seem to be reinventing the wheel.

2) It'd one less widget / knob / dial for the user to worry about. If they poke the helpful post button, they would automatically be giving the thread a rating bump. And as a user, this would seem totally natural ... if I found the post useful, then pretty much by definition I'm finding the thread useful (or not, as the case may be). I wouldn't really understand why I would have to go and manually give the thread a rating bump as a separate action.

3) Replacing the existing (and somewhat arbitrary 1 to 5 star) Thread Rating with a numeric Helpful Threads rating derived purely from the combined ratings of the posts in the thread would provide a true measure of how helpful any given thread is.

Perhaps there's a need for a Helpful Threads mod as a separate beastie instead of Helpful Posts ... but if I'm running Helpful Posts, I'd really like that option to replace the existing Thread Rating stuff with a derived value from the sum of the helpful posts. So instead of the rating stars on forumdisplay, I'd see a (sortable) numeric rating column.

-- hugh

[Milez]

Just a quick suggestion...

in the helpfulanswers.php page I removed 'Post 228819 in thread:' from the helpful_answers_top_bit template. My suggestion would be to grab the username to replace that text with. Something like:

Username in ThreadTitle

Users might enjoy seeing who is the most valuable poster.

The other suggestion I have is to enforce the Reputation rules. Right now a user may rate a post with the helpful anwers system and can also rate the same post with the standard Reputation controls in the postbit.

[Razasharp]

Originally Posted by Milez

The other suggestion I have is to enforce the Reputation rules. Right now a user may rate a post with the helpful anwers system and can also rate the same post with the standard Reputation controls in the postbit.

That's working as intended - because the rep system can have a different value

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Milez

Just a quick suggestion...

in the helpfulanswers.php page I removed 'Post 228819 in thread:' from the helpful_answers_top_bit template. My suggestion would be to grab the username to replace that text with. Something like:

Username in ThreadTitle

You can customize the template to look like any of thoes combinations.

[dancue]

Originally Posted by Ted S

No....

What did you have in mind?

A helpful rating earns x credits set by user.

[dancue]

Originally Posted by Theater

See if these work for ya...

Thanks, but I was kind of hoping for the red and green colored ones.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by dancue

Thanks, but I was kind of hoping for the red and green colored ones.

I'd suggest working with a designer if you want custom icons. You can use any images you want with the system...

[dutchbb]

Great mod, should be introduced in vb4. Question: how can we have it like youtube?

See screenshot:

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by dutchbb

Great mod, should be introduced in vb4. Question: how can we have it like youtube?

See screenshot:

Thanks.

Very easy to change that you can do by editing the templates and adding an inactive (greyed out) icon.