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]

The import script pulls in votes from the Thank You post modification. Once it is fixed you will be able to import any votes without disrupting the existing system.

No ETA as of yet. I need to figure out what went wrong first.

[Ted S]

Also to be clear, I have an updated version of ha_import but need to test it. As with all things in mods the big time issue is finding people who use the test to insure it works and fixing bugs if they are found.

[The Smoking Gun]

Was that a subtle invitation?
My running forum might be too low in traffic to properly id bigs, but my intentions of this use was more for a new forum I plan on getting licensed for in the next two weeks, which "should" be more active and field test worthy.

Thanks for the input/updates, none the less!

TSG!

[Ted S]

Nope, just a statement of fact!

For a new forum you have no need for the import script as there's nothing to import. Even an established forum doesn't need an import unless you want all of your "Thanks!" votes to count as Helpful Ratings... If you don't have the Thank You Post mod then you definitely don't need it.

[cooltechie]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Also to be clear, I have an updated version of ha_import but need to test it. As with all things in mods the big time issue is finding people who use the test to insure it works and fixing bugs if they are found.

If you feel you have a near finished version of import you would like to test, I'm willing to give it a try. I could do without it, but then again, the members have invested some time to thank others, so it's probably better to get them counted.

[tpearl5]

Originally Posted by Ted S

As for your second request I'd suggest using template conditions to set that up. It's probably easier.

Does the conditional have to go in postbit directly? I tried putting it in the template, but it didn't parse.

Originally Posted by Ted S

Awesome! I'll get that updated for 1.9.1 beta 290239

haha - I did some digging for the proper condition on vbulletin.com, then I realized I already used it in my postbit for some ads.

Now that I think about it, that block isn't really useful if the second post is the most helpful either. Here's an example of what it looks like: http://cellphoneforums.net/verizon/t...box-limit.html Any ideas for the conditional to exclude the second post if most helpful too?

[Ted S]

No idea on the second post...

For the condition you can add it right to the helpful_answers template.

[Daky]

Hi,

Is there a way to reset reputation + all statstics on this script?

As i mentioned before Ted enabled limitation on how many times user can vote in 24 h, they abused this script on my forum so, i would like to start all over, and reset everything to 0.

Is that possible? if yes, please if someone can tell me how.

Thank you very much.
D

[The Smoking Gun]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Nope, just a statement of fact!

For a new forum you have no need for the import script as there's nothing to import. Even an established forum doesn't need an import unless you want all of your "Thanks!" votes to count as Helpful Ratings... If you don't have the Thank You Post mod then you definitely don't need it.

Yes I understand that where my next forum is concerned but my currently running forum of over two years, will also be getting this mod, and thank you hack has been installed, although the import lost those from the other BB software I got so frustrated with and ended up upgrading to this, so there are not a whole lot of thanks to consider but there may be by the time you release the new stable version since you do not wish for me to be a tester of it, which is probably better for my limited php skill level!

Thanks none the less though, we all appreciate all your hard work, as is true for all the other developers who post the many versatile hacks here for no additional cost, and as soon as any one of my sites goes from red to green, some will be shared with those whose mods contributed to that!

TSG!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Daky

Hi,

Is there a way to reset reputation + all statstics on this script?

Absolutely. Just delete all the data from the tables helpfulpost and helpfulanswer and it will all go away. Alternatively you can use the field userid to limit who has their data removed.