Add-On Releases - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Allow users to rate individual posts

Helpful Answers has been used to record over 6 MILLION times on more than 2,000 forums. If you're not using HA your users are looking for it!

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 to rate individual posts as either helpful or not allowing future visitors to understand the value of each post.

Designed to be flexible, HA has over 30 configurable settings:

• Use image or text ratings AJAX or traditional links.
• Offer yes/no or scaled 1-10 point ranking.
• Turn off negative ratings for a positive only system.
• Decide which forums are open for helpful answer ratings.
• Audit the system and identify top users and potential abusers.
• Ban specific members from using the system.
• Customize the message shown after a post is rated.
• Show a page with the top helpful posts.
• Show rating stats on a user's profile.
• Hide posts that rate "too low"
• Template driven so you can customize it all for 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 [Must Read]:

Step 1: Upload the addon files found in the upload/ folder to your forum directory
Step 2: Install the plugin through your vB Administration area
Step 3: Configure settings & enable the mod in individual forums

You must configure settings & enable forums before voting will show up.
Anonymous Stats Tracking (optional):

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. You can disable this through the admin.

Mod Philosophy -- Drive Your Own Success:

All of my mods are inspired by my work in digital marketing and are designed to drive registrations, interaction or other engagement activities the core platform does not address.

Each is designed to fit a general need by providing a starting point but it's on you to decide how to make things work to their best possible outcome. Feel free to suggest what you'd like to see next but don't wait to have what everyone else has; figure out what your forum needs and customize away.

[El Orans]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Try reverting the templates. vBulletin has an issue where data gets "stuck" and needs to be forcefully updated.

I have reverted everything, still the same issue. Any other options?

[Alan_SP]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Tips & Tricks Using Template Variables:

{vb:raw post.totalrank} - The total number of ratings
{vb:raw post.goodrank} - The number of good ratings
{vb:raw post.badrank} - The number of bad ratings
{vb:raw post.helpfulgood} - True if the post is positive overall (more good than bad ratings)
{vb:raw post.rate_helpfulanswer} - True if the user can rate the post (false if they are banned or have rated it).
{vb:raw post.helpfulanswerid} - True if the user has already rated the post.

I would really like to have something like that to use in postbit (and of course in postbit_legacy).

For example:

User rated: Total/Pos/Neg
User get rated: Total/Pos/Neg

Or just Pos/Neg

As it is used in Post Thanks and Post Groan mod. Now you have to go to profile to see stats like this.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Alan_SP

I would really like to have something like that to use in postbit (and of course in postbit_legacy).

For example:

User rated: Total/Pos/Neg
User get rated: Total/Pos/Neg

Or just Pos/Neg

As it is used in Post Thanks and Post Groan mod. Now you have to go to profile to see stats like this.

Thanks for the suggestion. These variables are excluded as they would (currently) require a query per post which is not ideal for load.

[Alan_SP]

Yes, I understand, that is a problem. So, you would need to rewrite mod...

[sticky]

Ted, I was wondering if it would be possible to model the hide post feature after the ignore feature. That way it would work for all styles and users could click to see the negatively rated post if they still desired.

Example:

[Phaedrus]

Is there a way to make a list of who has liked and disliked at the bottom of the post? My users liked that in the Thank/Groans hacks.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Phaedrus

Is there a way to make a list of who has liked and disliked at the bottom of the post? My users liked that in the Thank/Groans hacks.

With the current code this would require a query per post which is not ideal. You could hack the hack to store this more easily.

[ayam]

Originally Posted by Munkholm

That would be AWESOME ! Is it possible to show a "top ten" of the most helpful answers for each month ?? I?ll need something like that before I install on the live site

Have been trying to get a "top list" by making up a url like:
http://mydomain.org/admincp/helpfula...&orderby=count

Thanks a ton for your efforts !!

this is what i've been looking too

hoping that Ted and Superman can add this for us. to make it visible to users is better

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by ayam

this is what i've been looking too

hoping that Ted and Superman can add this for us. to make it visible to users is better

Making up urls won't work in this case... but nice try.

As far as the feature, I'm looking at a version update this summer. If you want it in shorter order it's not a particularly difficult hack if you, or someone you know, has some decent coding skills... Votes are stored as individual entries and an overall score by post. The top helpful answers page uses the post scores, you'd have to switch things up to the vote log, add a little time checking and there you go. Nothing crazy but certainly not basic HTML either.

[ayam]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Making up urls won't work in this case... but nice try.

As far as the feature, I'm looking at a version update this summer. If you want it in shorter order it's not a particularly difficult hack if you, or someone you know, has some decent coding skills... Votes are stored as individual entries and an overall score by post. The top helpful answers page uses the post scores, you'd have to switch things up to the vote log, add a little time checking and there you go. Nothing crazy but certainly not basic HTML either.

i don't want to mess up anything with the coding or the forum so better to play safe, waiting for ur update

1 more question, is it normal when someone rating a post, they will be brought back to the 1st post?