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.

[Saviour]

WOL location not showing when users are visiting helpfulanswers.php.

[Ted S]

Thank you. This will be addressed in 1.9.

[Noctavia]

Ok, managed to get the text to change colour depending on the number of positive points, so yay, thankyou for that.

My next question, which I feel is going to be more dificult. Is there a way to soft delete a post if it receives a certain number of negative points? So for example, if three people give it a negative mark, and there's no positive against it, it gets soft deleted.

Does that make sense?

[Ted S]

You certainly could do this although it would require some code modifications to helpfulanswers.php to check votes against your business rules and perform the soft delete.

[Noctavia]

Originally Posted by Ted S

You certainly could do this although it would require some code modifications to helpfulanswers.php to check votes against your business rules and perform the soft delete.

Bugger. That's way over my head.

[Noctavia]

Quick question. Would the change to make the text show green affect the Ajax feature? It doesn't seem to be working anymore...

Also, while I'm here. I changed the phrase to say xx members like this post, which works great, for possitive hits. How can I make it say xx members liked this post, xx members didn't like this post?

[Ted S]

Depends on how you changed it. You can certainly make the color different without impacting the ajax but breaking it would be possible too.

As for changing the text, just work with the rating phrases as you see fit.

[Noctavia]

This is the text I've got:

PHP Code:

        <!-- message -->
<if condition="$post[goodrank] >= 10">
<span style="color:lime;">$post[message]</span>
<else />
$post[message]
</if>


<!--        <div id="post_message_$post[postid]">$post[message]</div> -->
        <!-- / message --> 


I can't figure out how to make the text red if there's 10 negative however. If the post has 10 positive AND 10 negative, it's still staying green. I wasn't sure if the following is correct to make it work that way:

PHP Code:

        <!-- message -->
<if condition="$post[goodrank] >= 10">
<span style="color:lime;">$post[message]</span>
<else />
<if condition="$post[badrank] >= 10">
<span style="color:red;">$post[message]</span>
<else />
$post[message]
</if>


<!--        <div id="post_message_$post[postid]">$post[message]</div> -->
        <!-- / message --> 


Also, with regards to the "x members liked this post." phrase, I can't figure out how to add in the second "don't like this post" line. The phrase I have is: {1} members liked this post. If I try {1} members liked this post. {2} members don't like this post. - the number 2 part is taking into account ALL votes, so it looks like 1 member liked it, but 2 didn't like it... when really, it's 1 like and 1 dislike.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Noctavia

I can't figure out how to make the text red if there's 10 negative however. If the post has 10 positive AND 10 negative, it's still staying green. I wasn't sure if the following is correct to make it work that way:

You need to reverse your code...

Right now you are saying if the post has more than 10 goodrank it should be green. If not AND if it has more than 10 badrank it should be lime. Instead you need to say if it has more than 10 badrank make it lime first since this is the end goal.

Also, with regards to the "x members liked this post." phrase, I can't figure out how to add in the second "don't like this post" line. The phrase I have is: {1} members liked this post. If I try {1} members liked this post. {2} members don't like this post. - the number 2 part is taking into account ALL votes, so it looks like 1 member liked it, but 2 didn't like it... when really, it's 1 like and 1 dislike.

You're using the wrong phrase variable. You need to edit:

<phrase 1="$post[goodrank]" 2="$post[totalrank]">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_x_out_of_y]</phrase>

And change it to:

<phrase 1="$post[goodrank]" 3="$post[badrank]">$vbphrase[helpfulanswer_x_out_of_y]</phrase>

This variable already exists in 1.9.

[Ted S]

I know there's a lot of interest in 1.9 but I still haven't had many comments on the effectiveness of the changes. For those of you who want to use the new features please try the beta on your dev site.

If you do not have a dev site PM me and I can give you access to try the new version so we can get this released.

Changes include:
- Rating a thread sends a notification to the user which can be viewed
- Viewing helpfulanswers.php updates WOL
- Optional message under the first post about which post
- Numerous small tweaks to templates and phrases