Add-on Page for Most-Liked Posts and Threads

[ForestForTrees]

To grow, many forums require a steady stream of new participants. To impress these potential new users and for the benefit of all users it might be useful to have a simple page that lists the most-liked posts and the most-liked threads. Basically, it's a place where we highlight our best content.

Kier made an example add-on to do this, but he only did it for a video. It seems unlikely that he will be excited about supporting it:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/likes-review-most-liked-posts.5329/

I think it's a terrific addon, though, and have it running on my site. I don't really care about post-permissions, as we don't use those much. I like that the addon itself is extremely simple. It would, of course, be most helpful in a small site.

Would anyone be willing to update it to a version that has a separate page for the threads with the most likes? (or a page of threads with the most likes in the first 50 posts?) I'd be willing to pay a modest amount. Hopefully it wouldn't involve much more than some SQL. I'd do it myself, but I don't know SQL or the internal workings of XF and anything MVC freaks me out even though it shouldn't. I'm a bit of a noob.

Just to be clear, there would be two URLs, like:
xenforo.com/community/liked-threads
xenforo.com/community/liked-posts
and they would highlight the best threads and posts site wide.

If anyone was up for the coding, I'd be happy to contact Kier and ask for permission to write code similar to his or to start with his. I can't imagine he would mind, but if he does, it would, of course, be off.

 

[trichome]

This would be a very engaging and useful feature, especially if it could be sorted by different time periods. I'd be surprised if it wasn't added to core eventually.

 

[Daniel Hood]

I'm considering making a "hall of fame" add on that would have 3 sections, most liked threads/posts/users. It will show all time by default but I want to also include a search function for displaying the days, weeks, and months most liked.

 

[Jeremy]

@Daniel Hood, most liked users already exist in 1.2: http://xenforo.com/community/members/?type=likes

 

[Daniel Hood]

Thank you for pointing that out. Might end up including that same section in this "module", makes sense for it to be visible.

 

[Daniel Hood]

http://phphelpcenter.com/hall something like this? I'm probably going to change /hall to /HallOfFame or something.

 

[erich37]

This idea makes sense and I think it should be included in XF-core somehow.

This would definitely be easier for the user to find interesting content than with the current "Thread Display Options"-dropdown and using the filter "First Message Likes".

 

[Daniel Hood]

Not sure this is entirely what you had in mind but I feel like this is a decent start. It's hard to tell with my forum as there aren't enough threads and posts but: http://phphelpcenter.com/index.php?hall/

It gets the 10 posts with the most likes and 10 threads with the most likes (based on the first post in the thread), depending on which one you're looking at. These posts are then displayed as posts as if you were looking at a thread (uses the same template as a post).

The phrases "Hall Of Fame", "Most Liked Posts", and "Most Liked Threads" are phrases controlled within the admin panel, along with the description under the title of the page.

I'm going to change it so that the index shows something else instead of the most liked posts by default. I'm just not sure what to display instead. Maybe a spotlight or something.

I'm also going to provide the ability to search for most liked content based on a date range (from {startdate} to {enddate}) and maybe even within a specific node.

Also going to give the ability to choose the route in the admin panel instead of it being /hall

If you'd like to download and test what's currently done, I'm not adding it as a resource yet but you can get it here: http://phphelpcenter.com/downloads/PHChallOfFame-0.0.1.zip

 

[ForestForTrees]

For anyone else following this thread, I've been away for a while, but just caught up. Daniel turned the above into a Resource:
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/hall-of-fame.2061/

As I've thought more about this add-on, I think that, at least for the forum I work on, Most-Liked Threads is particularly important, though it would be nice to weight by length of thread. It's a bit of a challenge to think about how to do the weighting optimally, but, however it's done, I think that people want to find the best threads, not the best posts. Perhaps it could simply have a tab for most liked "short" threads, that divides the total number of threads by the total number of posts in the thread.

Any way that it's done, I like the idea. Let the cream rise to the top.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Let the cream rise to the top.

For alot of forums, it might be best to decide this yourself (as the admin) and make a "Best threads" listing manually.
or at least be able to edit the list.

The threads with the most likes are often just the oldest.

 

[ForestForTrees]

For alot of forums, it might be best to decide this yourself (as the admin) and make a "Best threads" listing manually.

Great point. Though with thousands of threads and without any obvious contenders, I would need something based on a database query or server stats to come up with a shortlist. With my forum, I wouldn't know where to start. Perhaps an addon like this could help.