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.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by TheShanka

I'm unsure why this mod isn't currently working for my site; vBulletin 4.1.4 - I've installed it, all the files are up, made settings changed as I thought appropriate, but no joy. Perhaps it's the bit in the first post about it needing to be enabled in certain forums? How do I go about this as it only seems to mention threads in the Options for it.

Thanks in advance; looking forward to the feature working with my site - the members should get a real kick out of it.

If it's not enabled in the forum you are viewing it certainly won't show up in the forum to "work".

You can enable it in the same place you would enable any any other option, the forum manager. Or you can use the bulk manager in yoru Admin CP to enable it in many forums. Both are explained briefly in the install file but it's pretty simple, you check yes or not

[scubasteve3]

Originally Posted by Ted S

There's a feature to not show this on the first post. Enable that.

Then pop open product-helpful_answers vb404.xml and go to line 907, change this from == to !=

Save. Upload the XML file. Done.



As in posts on the frontpage or articles stored sepertely from posts?

Thanks Ted. I got it so the vote only shows up on the first post.

What I mean was, is it possible to add the same voting system thumbs up/down for front page articles?

Also, Would it be possible to change the way it shows the rating score from X # of users found this helpful. To the Thumbs up Icon and +X (where x is the # of people who found this helpful)

One last thing, how are the results stored in the database? What I mean is, the default thread rating system, the score is titled "votetotal". So I can run a query to order by votetotal. Is this possible with this mod? (Sorry, I'm obviously not a programmer)

Thank you so much!

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by scubasteve3

What I mean was, is it possible to add the same voting system thumbs up/down for front page articles?

If it's just posts, yes, but it will take some work.

If you have articles via the CMS then you;d have to more or less rebuild it using the same code base. The system is setup for post IDs so another element would not work.

Also, Would it be possible to change the way it shows the rating score from X # of users found this helpful. To the Thumbs up Icon and +X (where x is the # of people who found this helpful)

Edit the template. Remove the X of Y and replace it with the right variable as shown in ths first post of this thread.

One last thing, how are the results stored in the database? What I mean is, the default thread rating system, the score is titled "votetotal". So I can run a query to order by votetotal. Is this possible with this mod? (Sorry, I'm obviously not a programmer)

There is a record of total votes and good votes per thread but it's in the table helpfulanswers, not post.

[scubasteve3]

Originally Posted by Ted S

If it's just posts, yes, but it will take some work.
Edit the template. Remove the X of Y and replace it with the right variable as shown in ths first post of this thread.

Ok. I got that so now I can make it so it generates whatever I want it to say after the user has voted. Is it possible to add the gray version of the thumbs up/down image here and next to that say the text.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by scubasteve3

Ok. I got that so now I can make it so it generates whatever I want it to say after the user has voted. Is it possible to add the gray version of the thumbs up/down image here and next to that say the text.

It's HTML, you can add whatever images or other elements you want. <img src="xxx"> for images...

[scubasteve3]

Originally Posted by Ted S

It's HTML, you can add whatever images or other elements you want. <img src="xxx"> for images...

Right.

I guess what I'm trying to do is have it so that after you vote (for thumbs up only, no negative votes counted) then the green thumbs up will be replaced by a gray thumbsup and next to that will have +goodranks.

I got it so that it says +goodranks but I need some help with the if statement for if users have already voted to insert the gray thumbsup image.

[Ted S]

You already have to logic down... An image is no different than text, it merely needs a tag.

Just add the <img> tag to whatever code you changed the +goodranks bit too.

[Hateman]

Hi,

i installed mod_deflate (apache) on my server, but since this installation, this tool don't work correctly on firefox 5.0. Any ideas about this problem?

[Ted S]

Have you tried it with FF 5 without the module installed?

[Hateman]

Hi,

yes the same problem. But im not sure about the problem. I send you a private message with a link about it, is it okay?