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]

It will add to it.

The script is posted a few pages back but still needs a test. Looking to do that this week or next weekend

[tpearl5]

Ted, any word on that user helpful post report?

[sockwater]

Originally Posted by Ted S

That's an interesting issue. Fixing the top posts page is simple but the bigger question is how or when to delete the votes. If it on soft delete they would be lost for a restored post. On hard delete and they'd sit around for invisible posts.

Thoughts?

Add a flag to each vote to show if it's soft deleted or not. When a post is soft deleted, soft delete the votes, when a post if hard deleted, hard delete the votes.

[Ted S]

Soft deleting votes is possible but you start to get into more and more variables to check things adding to the queries. I'm not sure it's worth the overhead, even small overhead, for the limited times where it applies.

[cooltechie]

Originally Posted by Ted S

It will add to it.

The script is posted a few pages back but still needs a test. Looking to do that this week or next weekend

I will look for it and might give it a quick test.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by cooltechie

I will look for it and might give it a quick test.

here it is to save you some time. Let me know your results. I will be installing the thank you mod on my test server and running a few test imports over the weekend.

[Ted S]

Beta release 10 has been posted. This is a small bug fix to address issues with WOL, New Installs and a few other reported issues as well as to allow the notifications system to be turned off.

Hopefully this will be the final beta (cross fingers) before the stable is posted.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by tpearl5

Ted, any word on that user helpful post report?

Must have missed this or just lost my mind but I take it this is a new feature request... Please link/ explain.

[cooltechie]

Originally Posted by Ted S

here it is to save you some time. Let me know your results. I will be installing the thank you mod on my test server and running a few test imports over the weekend.

Using beta 10

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.3:

Invalid SQL:

		SELECT userid,postid,threadid
		FROM post_thanks as post_thanks;

MySQL Error   : Unknown column 'threadid' in 'field list'
Error Number  : 1054
Request Date  : Wednesday, August 5th 2009 @ 03:24:04 AM
Error Date    : Wednesday, August 5th 2009 @ 03:24:04 AM
Script        : http://www.example.com/forum/admincp/ha_import.php
Referrer      : http://www.example.com/forum/login.php?do=login
Classname     : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.81-community

[Ted S]

Sorry about that. I installed the mod and ran a quick test to get past the database errors.

Also think I found the bug causing the duplicate posts. The short explination, I wasn't checking for a record on the post and was recreating it even if you already had votes. This is a bad thing and made duplicate posts show up. It's been fixed.

Just be sure not to re-run this script once it's complete, you'll reimport vote records.