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.

[Ryuk]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Thank you for the comments.

The variable modification is intentional as not every user wants the options to appear at the same place.

how about an "option" to "automatically add the template"? that would be awesome

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Ryuk

how about an "option" to "automatically add the template"? that would be awesome

Wish there was a way to do both; don't think there is.

[Quantnet]

Feature suggestion:
The post rated most useful in a thread will be highlighted so it stands out.

[Razasharp]

Maybe sort by most useful/highest rated instead?

A lot of sites do this for comments on news etc..

[Ted S]

Thanks for the suggestions. Both are doable and I'll add them next week.

[biocyberman]

Hello Ted_S,
Could you make it possible to rate answer with stars or numerical values (1~10) and a listing of top 10 (or some number) posts in a thread?
The binary yes-no answer is still not satisfactory, IMO.

Thanks in advance.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by biocyberman

Hello Ted_S,
Could you make it possible to rate answer with stars or numerical values (1~10) and a listing of top 10 (or some number) posts in a thread?
The binary yes-no answer is still not satisfactory, IMO.

Thanks in advance.

The binary ratings are the purpose of this feature; stars or a 5 or 10 point scale was not the idea behind the addon. This addon is meant to show the utility of a post much like how Yahoo Answers or any of the thousands of other Q&A style forums work. A user is asked what posts they like or dislike showing an aggregate rating of how many people found it helpful.

It sounds like the issue isn't about satisfactory rating options but rather about a mismatch in what you're looking to do and what this is intended to do.

While I would love to accommodate and build this option in so both were possible what you're looking for is simply a different addon. Not that I don't like the idea but simply that merging the two systems together would basically mean adding a lot of bad overhead to each that just isn't needed.

Gutting this hack and putting in just a star or 10 point system would seem a lot more logical to me to get your intended functionality.

[Razasharp]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Thanks for the suggestions. Both are doable and I'll add them next week.

Great stuff, thanks Ted! This will be handy for more than 'forums' then

I really hope it gets tied in with rep somehow, that would be bliss or maybe have some other summary on the users profile/postbit? To say how many of their posts are positive/negative and work out a rep for them that way (maybe positive points minus negative ones perhaps) or just a ratio as a percentage? Or how about getting positive points in some sections are somehow 'worth more' (so less value in say off-topic forums?).

[Ted S]

Rep system tie-in is coming... Check for version 1.5 next week.

[Razasharp]

Thanks Ted - you're a star!