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]

You'll need to update both the XML file and the upload/helpfulanswers.php file,

[ctrlbrk]

Hi,

I am brand new to vbulletin so I apologize. I read through many posts but could not find this. I am sure it is here, but maybe someone would be so kind to repeat.

What code can I place in postbit so that under the "Posts: xx" display it will show "Thanked: xx times"? I want it so if it is 0 (zero) nothing is shown, otherwise it would say "Thanked: 3 times" etc. This is the total number of times the user has been thanked across ALL posts.

Thank you.
Mike

[Ted S]

Mike there is not support for that level of reporting in this addon

[ctrlbrk]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Mike there is not support for that level of reporting in this addon

Thank you Ted. You have an excellent product here. Do you think this may be added in a future version or perhaps I am missing some other add-on?

Have a good one,
Mike

[Ted S]

It's in the roadmap but not something you will likely see in the next few weeks

[NLP-er]

Hi, what I need to do to have some link in nav bar to most rated posts?

[Saviour]

Nice...me likey...marks Installed.

Have a question about the Most Helpful Answers page, though. I notice that in the Posts column...it will list the title of the thread.

Anyway to limit the amount of characters for the thread title in this column?

Also...it would seem the Forum title and Average Rating column content is not centered in the column. Can ya fix this?

I also have one last question. I'd like to include a "top of page image" within the table that calls the info for user votes on a thread/post. What do I edit to include this?

Thanks, bunches, for this mod. Replaces the post thank you/groan for my Articles forum...

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by NLP-er

Hi, what I need to do to have some link in nav bar to most rated posts?

edit the navbar template and add the link

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Saviour

Have a question about the Most Helpful Answers page, though. I notice that in the Posts column...it will list the title of the thread.

Anyway to limit the amount of characters for the thread title in this column?

In helpfulanswers.php find:

SELECT post.postid,post.title as posttile,helpfulpost.goodrank,helpfulpost.totalrank,helpfulpost.lastvote,
   thread.threadid,thread.title as title,thread.postusername as postusername,forum.title as ftitle $helpful_selectby
   $hook_query_fields
  FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulpost as helpfulpost

and change it to:

SELECT post.postid,LEFT(post.title,35) as posttile,helpfulpost.goodrank,helpfulpost.totalrank,helpfulpost.lastvote,
   thread.threadid,thread.title as title,thread.postusername as postusername,forum.title as ftitle $helpful_selectby
   $hook_query_fields
  FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "helpfulpost as helpfulpost

Where 35 is the number of characters to grab.

Also...it would seem the Forum title and Average Rating column content is not centered in the column. Can ya fix this?

Odd. The cables cells are set to center. Is this the data results or the header?

I also have one last question. I'd like to include a "top of page image" within the table that calls the info for user votes on a thread/post. What do I edit to include this?

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?

[Saviour]

Did a search for the text you said look for...it's not found in the helpfulanswers.php file.

Found this, though:

SELECT post.postid,post.goodrank,post.totalrank
					FROM post as post
					WHERE totalrank > 0 
					");

Also...I'm referring to centering the data results for those two columns...they don't look like they are centered.