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.

[torontonian]

Hi,

Thanks for this excellent plugin. It was just what I've been looking for, although I have a few questions which may require a few mods:

1. How can I make the "Rating History and Editing" stats appear in the moderator's control panel? I can see this in the admin control panel, but I'd like moderators or at least super moderators to be able to see this info too.

2. Is there a way to adapt this to show the reputation of a user based on the ratings that their posts have received as opposed to the ratings that they have assigned to other posts. In other words, I'd like the admin and moderator to be able to see which users have received a large amount of positive and negative replies to their posts.

3. For the result display options, can you add a "negative ratings" column next to the "positive ratings" column. Currently, I have to look at the "total" and "positive" and see where there is a difference in numbers to know that there are some negatives. It would be much quicker to be able to spot the negative ones instantly and also to be able to sort by negative ratings.

The reason why I am asking for all of this is that I would like to use this to ensure that posts are always answered of the highest quality so I need to see who is answering incorrectly in order to improve the standard of replies.

Thanks again. I look forward to receiving your reply.

[guvner]

For a future revision, I'd like to request that if possible, all the mod's controls are consolidated into single page as currently they appears as 2 entries under VB options and again as a sidebar menu item in the adminCP.

Mike

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by torontonian

1. How can I make the "Rating History and Editing" stats appear in the moderator's control panel? I can see this in the admin control panel, but I'd like moderators or at least super moderators to be able to see this info too.

You would need to copy the admincp file and possibly change it a bit to work with mod permissions as well as create a new bitfield xml file to get the link to show up.

Originally Posted by torontonian

2. Is there a way to adapt this to show the reputation of a user based on the ratings that their posts have received as opposed to the ratings that they have assigned to other posts. In other words, I'd like the admin and moderator to be able to see which users have received a large amount of positive and negative replies to their posts.

Again this isn't native to the program but you could run a query to get it.

Something like "SELECT userid,sum(goodrank) as goodranks FROM postid ORDER BY goodranks DESC LIMIT 50" would show you the top 50 ranked members.

3. For the result display options, can you add a "negative ratings" column next to the "positive ratings" column. Currently, I have to look at the "total" and "positive" and see where there is a difference in numbers to know that there are some negatives. It would be much quicker to be able to spot the negative ones instantly and also to be able to sort by negative ratings.

Are you referring to in the admin panel or on the user script?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by guvner

For a future revision, I'd like to request that if possible, all the mod's controls are consolidated into single page as currently they appears as 2 entries under VB options and again as a sidebar menu item in the adminCP.

Mike

Sorry Mike but neither will be consolidated in the official addon. I have two entries in the settings group because one is simply too long and the reputation features don't apply to all users.

As for the links in the sidebar, those are different features and would not make sense to combine (one does not bulk edit forums while reviewing ratings).

Of course you could always change things yourself if you want it more consolidated.

[Ted S]

Based on comments from a few members (and mainly biocyberman) I've added a second rating option to the script. This option allows for posts to be voted on from 1 to 10 rather than just being marked as "helpful or not helpful".

The ten point scale is an optional feature which is enabled globally (either you use one or the other). There are a few features that won't work with the ten point scale including the profile stats, the no negative option and others. However there are also some new features with the ten point scale.

I encourage you to try this out on a test site (or your live site if you're looking to switch over) and give me your feedback.

To remove all previous votes (required if changing methods) run the queries:

UPDATE post SET goodrank = '', totalrank = '';
DELETE FROM helpfulanswer;

If you use table prefixes be sure to include that as well.

Note: This is in beta and while it works fine on my system I'm leaving 1.4.2 as the official version until I get some feedback on how this works.

Second Note: To get this done I used numbers (1 2 3 4 5....) for rankings rather than stars. I will be looking into adding a simple star image in the future and encourage suggestions on that image.

[Ted S]

Changes in 1.5.0
- (Feature) Addition of ten-point rating scale (optional)
- (Feature) Addition of profile stats for ten-point rating scale
- (Feature) Modified display of top ratings page for ten-point ratings
- (Admin) Addition of negative ratings column for moderation
- (Bug) Rating's still show up in showpost template after user has voted
- (Bug) Individual user can't be banned

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Based on comments from a few members (and mainly biocyberman) I've added a second rating option to the script. This option allows for posts to be voted on from 1 to 10 rather than just being marked as "helpful or not helpful".

Why not just use the existing rating system for this?

[GigaSb]

Originally Posted by GigaSb

how do i make the text to be in the right side?

I added div align into postbit_legacy:

<div align="right">
$helpful_answers
</div>


it worked at first.. but when updated to last version its not effecting.

can i get help here?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by GigaSb

can i get help here?

I responded to that several pages back... You may want to search for the answer but the general idea is that there is already a div controlling the reviews so you'll want to either edit that or wrap the div in a table.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Why not just use the existing rating system for this?

I'm not aware of a native post rating system in vBulletin...?