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 Milez

Ted,

Finally got around to testing 1.8.2 and had 1 issues:

- I think you forgot to add the code to helpfulanswers.php to show the username of the user who received the rep. If you could also grab the user who gave rep that might be pretty cool too. For now I would take either!

The code is there. Using the variable is up to you.

[vbuser99]

Ted, could you add a feature/option to highlight the highest rated post? That would be great!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by vbuser99

Ted, could you add a feature/option to highlight the highest rated post? That would be great!

This already exists. See the first post.

[Wizardjv]

I get page not found when clicking the buttons, but when you copy the location of the link and paste it in the browser it works. Any idea why it would be doing that?

[vbuser99]

Originally Posted by Ted S

This already exists. See the first post.

Thanks Ted, got it.

May be I missed in between hundreds of messages, is there an option to exclude users being rated. To give an example we have a bot that does auto message posting we do not want it to be rated at all.

Great add-on again! Thanks.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by vbuser99

Thanks Ted, got it.

May be I missed in between hundreds of messages, is there an option to exclude users being rated. To give an example we have a bot that does auto message posting we do not want it to be rated at all.

Great add-on again! Thanks.

There is not. However you could use a simple conditional to do this manually.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Wizardjv

I get page not found when clicking the buttons, but when you copy the location of the link and paste it in the browser it works. Any idea why it would be doing that?

Are you using an SEO solution of any sort? Are your forums in a sub folder or the main folder?

[edenx]

Coool Mod!

1. How can I highlight all posts with Helpful > Number ?

2. Will you support this for VB 4.0 ?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by edenx

1. How can I highlight all posts with Helpful > Number ?

You can use the variables show in the first post to do this with template conditionals.

Originally Posted by edenx

2. Will you support this for VB 4.0 ?

Vbulletin 4.0 does not exist to the public yet. I plan to upgrade this addon for it but can't speak to something I have no access to in any detail.

[Strike3ForumsMH]

Ted, your fix (the latest version) fixed my problem 100%, so thank you.

I did have a few suggestions, notably on the helpfulanswers.php page:
1. For the layout, remove the "Post xxxxxin thread *threadtitle* and change it to "*threadtitle by *username*" linking to the post of course. I know this is possible with a few edits, but I think it gives a more friendly look to the page for users that you might want to consider.
2. Add a filter to the helpfulanswers.php page to allow users to either see the most helpfulanswers by either a time measure (last 24 hours, week, etc) or by a threshold of votes (only answers with 5 +'s or whatever.)
3. Right now the helpfulanswers.php page does not consider usergroup permissions. And while if someone clicks on a thread they can't access and that won't change, they do see the thread title, obviously if there is a private forum with sensitive info, this could be a problem. And I do realize that you can enable/disable on a per forum basis, but I really would like this enabled through out my forum.

Anywho, this is a great modification and I just wanted to share this with you as food for thought. I am actually using this in replacement of the traditional reputation system. Thanks for such a great mod Ted.