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

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 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.

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.

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.

History of this addon:

This addon was originally developed for private use in 2006 for a site of mine but after getting several past clients requested requests and messages I decided to package it up for public release.

[Ted S]

Tips & Tricks Using Template Variables:

While the Helpful Answers section may appear to only add to a small part of your post it can be used much more extensively to change the color of an entire post, to add a special icon or just about anything else you like. Here are list of the variables available for your templates and a few sample conditions you can use with them:

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

Future Updates:

I'm pleased with this addon so far but plan to extend it as feedback comes in so please share your comments and suggestions as they will be read and responded too.

Coming soon... A page showcasing your top 10 (or 20 or 30 or 100) posts.

[Ted S]

Thanks for the private feedback; I've added a simple page showing the Most Helpful Answers. This can be disabled through the options and the number of results to show can also be configured.

[Spank]

Brill, will download and install later. Thanks

[Rickeo]

Any chance of getting this to work on 3.8x?

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by Rickeo

Any chance of getting this to work on 3.8x?

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=204117

[GigaSb]

help here please, got errors:

Database error in vBulletin 3.7.0:

Invalid SQL:

SELECT
post.*, post.username AS postusername, post.ipaddress AS ip, IF(post.visible = 2, 1, 0) AS isdeleted,
user.*, userfield.*, usertextfield.*,
icon.title as icontitle, icon.iconpath,
avatar.avatarpath, NOT ISNULL(customavatar.userid) AS hascustomavatar, customavatar.dateline AS avatardateline,customavatar.width AS avwidth,customavatar.height AS avheight,
spamlog.postid AS spamlog_postid,
deletionlog.userid AS del_userid, deletionlog.username AS del_username, deletionlog.reason AS del_reason,
editlog.userid AS edit_userid, editlog.username AS edit_username, editlog.dateline AS edit_dateline,
editlog.reason AS edit_reason, editlog.hashistory,
postparsed.pagetext_html, postparsed.hasimages,
sigparsed.signatureparsed, sigparsed.hasimages AS sighasimages,
sigpic.userid AS sigpic, sigpic.dateline AS sigpicdateline, sigpic.width AS sigpicwidth, sigpic.height AS sigpicheight,
IF(displaygroupid=0, user.usergroupid, displaygroupid) AS displaygroupid, infractiongroupid

,post.goodrank,post.totalrank,helpfulanswer.helpfu lanswerid
FROM post AS post
LEFT JOIN user AS user ON(user.userid = post.userid)
LEFT JOIN userfield AS userfield ON(userfield.userid = user.userid)
LEFT JOIN usertextfield AS usertextfield ON(usertextfield.userid = user.userid)
LEFT JOIN icon AS icon ON(icon.iconid = post.iconid)
LEFT JOIN avatar AS avatar ON(avatar.avatarid = user.avatarid) LEFT JOIN customavatar AS customavatar ON(customavatar.userid = user.userid)
LEFT JOIN spamlog AS spamlog ON(spamlog.postid = post.postid)
LEFT JOIN deletionlog AS deletionlog ON(post.postid = deletionlog.primaryid AND deletionlog.type = 'post')
LEFT JOIN editlog AS editlog ON(editlog.postid = post.postid)
LEFT JOIN postparsed AS postparsed ON(postparsed.postid = post.postid AND postparsed.styleid = 4 AND postparsed.languageid = 3)
LEFT JOIN sigparsed AS sigparsed ON(sigparsed.userid = user.userid AND sigparsed.styleid = 4 AND sigparsed.languageid = 3)
LEFT JOIN sigpic AS sigpic ON(sigpic.userid = post.userid)
LEFT JOIN helpfulanswer AS helpfulanswer ON(helpfulanswer.postid = post.postid and helpfulanswer.userid = 1)
WHERE post.postid IN (0,210,231)
ORDER BY post.dateline;

MySQL Error : Table 'mysite_fph.helpfulanswer' doesn't exist
Error Number : 1146
Request Date : Wednesday, February 4th 2009 @ 11:26:54 AM
Error Date : Wednesday, February 4th 2009 @ 11:26:54 AM
Script : http://www.mysite.co.il/showthread.php?t=188
Referrer : http://www.mysite.co.il/forumdisplay.php?f=3
IP Address : XX.XXX.XX.XXX
Username : PCTech
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.37-standard

[6piston]

Originally Posted by GigaSb

help here please, got errors:

Database error in vBulletin 3.7.0:

try this:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....91&postcount=8

[6piston]

hi Ted

i've created the sql table manually using the link i posted above. but now, i get other sql errors. this time:

when i click Yes / No the AJAX effect doesn't work, instead, a window pops up and says:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Zerotohundred.com Database Error</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW,NOARCHIVE" />
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body { background-color: white; color: black; }
#container { width: 400px; }
#message { width: 400px; color: black; background-color: #FFFFCC; }
#bodytitle { font: 13pt/15pt verdana, arial, sans-serif; height: 35px; vertical-align: top; }
.bodytext { font: 8pt/11pt verdana, arial, sans-serif; }
a:link { font: 8pt/11pt verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: red; }
a:visited { font: 8pt/11pt verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: #4e4e4e; }
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table cellpadding="3" cellspacing="5" id="container">
<tr>
<td><img src="http://www.zerotohundred.com/newforums/image.php?type=dberror" alt="Database Error" width="48" height="48" /></td>
<td id="bodytitle" width="100%">Database error</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bodytext" colspan="2">The Zerotohundred.com database has encountered a problem.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"><hr /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bodytext" colspan="2">
Please try the following:
<ul>
<li>Load the page again by clicking the <a href="#" onclick="window.location = window.location;">Refresh</a> button in your web browser.</li>
<li>Open the <a href="/">www.zerotohundred.com</a> home page, then try to open another page.</li>
<li>Click the <a href="javascript:history.back(1)">Back</a> button to try another link.</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bodytext" colspan="2">The www.zerotohundred.com forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may <a href="mailto:">contact them</a> if the problem persists.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bodytext" colspan="2">&nbsp;<br />We apologise for any inconvenience.</td>
</tr>
</table>

<form><textarea rows="15" cols="70" wrap="off" id="message">Database error in vBulletin 3.7.2:

Invalid SQL:



SELECT post.goodrank,post.totalrank

FROM vb3post

WHERE postid = 2661498;

MySQL Error : Unknown column 'post.goodrank' in 'field list'
Error Number : 1054
Request Date : Wednesday, February 4th 2009 @ 09:37:03 PM
Error Date : Wednesday, February 4th 2009 @ 09:37:04 PM
Script : http://www.zerotohundred.com/newforu...fulanswers.php
Referrer : http://www.zerotohundred.com/newforu...-sohc-bot.html
IP Address : 124.82.95.141
Username : Tom
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.51a-community-log</textarea></form>

</body>
</html>

so it's this:
MySQL Error : Unknown column 'post.goodrank' in 'field list'

please advise ted

[GigaSb]

i added the query that u advised me..
thank u very much!