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]

Originally Posted by Quantnet.org

question for Ted
How would i display the difference of $post[goodrank] - $post[badrank].

$post[overallrank]

[Ted S]

I've released 1.8.0 of this addon which is a small feature release.

The main purpose of this update is to introduce rollover rankings similar to what YouTube uses.

Rollover rankings can be enabled using the ratings dropdown option.

If you enable this option the template helpful_answers_roll will be used in place of helpful_answers. Please re-apply any customizations you may have made.

I have also updated the Top Helpful Answers page to include a new variable postusername as well as some hooks for other modifications.

1.9.0 will be coming next month and will include showing notifications when a post has been rated.

[DobieGillis?]

Noice Ted!

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Ted - any ideas on using $post[helpfulgood] in forumdisplay and $helpfulposts[totalranks] in postbit?

Ted - did ya see that part?

Thanks again for this great hack.

[DobieGillis?]

hmmm.... downloaded the new version but there is a sub folder listed as Helpful Answers 1.7. Is this correct?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by DobieGillis?

hmmm.... downloaded the new version but there is a sub folder listed as Helpful Answers 1.7. Is this correct?

Didn't change the zip properly. I'll repost it later but you're using the right copy.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Ted - did ya see that part?

Thanks again for this great hack.

Missed it.

What is your end goal with these variables in postbit?

[DobieGillis?]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Didn't change the zip properly. I'll repost it later but you're using the right copy.

gotcha, thanks!

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Missed it.

What is your end goal with these variables in postbit?

To display the number of helpful posts a member has below their username.

[Ted S]

Each post is saved as a distinct record so displaying this would require a query for every post (figure 10-50 queries per page which is a bad, bad thing).

The alternative option would be to extend the addon to update a user's profile every time their post is rated to store this.