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.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by Bigj85

BEWARE THIS POST CONTAINS COMMON SENSE
why dont you guys delete the files you uploaded for this mod,one of them is "cpnav_helpfulanswers.xml"
which is probably the file that makes the acp entry

well said!,

[peyman.nt]

How can I sort the posts by they rank?
while I using 10 points rank...
Like sorting by date,
Is it possible?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by akonze

BE AWARE! THIS THING CAN NOT BE UNINSTALLED!

I installed it and tried it out for my forum. Personally I did not find the design well and therefore I decided to stay with normal thread voting and the Thank Post addon. I then uninstalled this addon. It was removed from the addon list, but the section in the admin menu was not deleted. Now I have useless menu entries in the admin menu, which I can not get rid of. :-(

Please don't make assertions without at least asking for support first. This plugin can certainly be uninstalled. Have you removed the XML file or did you just disable the plugin?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by peyman.nt

How can I sort the posts by they rank?
while I using 10 points rank...
Like sorting by date,
Is it possible?

Unfortunately there is no hook to alter how posts are sorted. You would have to hack your showthread page to manually make the edit.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Holf- Andrew

I was wondering how i can uninstall this - I've uninstalled it through the Plugins & Products section in the Admin CP - but i am still getting it in the left hand side menu.

It is a great plugin - but i'm just finding it isn't needed for my forum.

No problem. Not every addon is for everyone.

Be sure to remove all the upload files including the one in includes/xml to fully remove the addon.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Milez

Hey thanks, that's exactly what I want! Added your thumbs images for you, they are transparent. See attached. Edit: Made them lighter.

Really looking forward to this update Ted

Awesome. I'll get the code out shortly.

[Milez]

Bigj85 that was hilarious

[Bigj85]

A few things I noticed about the extra variables you provided in your second post

This one used for highlighting the background

<if condition="$thread[toppost] == $post[postid]">background-color:#CCCCCC;</if>

also changes my private messages,I changed the messagearea with a blue background and it does the same thing to my pm message areas

Example

I fixed it for my board because I only use it for one thread by doing this

<if condition="$thread[toppost] == $post[postid] AND $thread[threadid] == 453">background-color:#375368;</if>

But you might wanna fix it for people who use it for more than I do

also the code to identify top rated post says

<if condition="$threadinfo[toppost] == $post[postid]">This is the top rated post!</code>

Shouldn't it say

<if condition="$thread[toppost] == $post[postid]">This is the top rated post!</if>

That's what worked for me but again it has to be changed or it shows in my private messages

[Ted S]

Thanks. I've been aware of these issues but lagged on updating the info post which has now been done.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Nope. There's nothing missing... There's simply different code used. The reputation page pulls in other elements this script doesn't need to pull in and this script pulls in elements it doesn't to insure everything is working properly.

What you would need to do is identify the plugin area vBplaza is calling and add it to the script as is necessary.

I see - unfortunately it's hard to see how vbplaza hooks into things since everything is encoded.