Helpfulness Rating

The Helpfulness Rating widget lets readers vote on whether a wiki page was helpful. It appears at the bottom of every published wiki page and shows running totals of positive and negative votes.

How It Works

Each published wiki page displays:

Was this article helpful? 👍 Yes (12) 👎 No (3)

Visitors click Yes or No. Their vote is counted immediately and the totals update without a page reload.

• Logged-in users can vote once per page (rate-limited by user ID)
• Guest visitors can vote once per page per browser session (rate-limited by session)

Votes are stored as post meta:

Meta Key	Description
_wbmw_helpful_yes	Total count of “Yes” votes
_wbmw_helpful_no	Total count of “No” votes

Enabling or Disabling the Widget

The helpfulness rating widget is controlled by the Display > Helpfulness Rating toggle.

1. Go to WB Plugins > Member Wiki > Display
2. Find the Helpfulness Rating section
3. Toggle Enable helpfulness rating widget on or off
4. Click Save Changes

When disabled, the widget is hidden from all wiki pages. Existing vote data is preserved.

Viewing Helpfulness Data

Vote counts are displayed publicly on each page. There is no dedicated admin dashboard for helpfulness data - you can query it directly from the database if needed:

// Get yes/no counts for a specific page
$yes = (int) get_post_meta( $page_id, '_wbmw_helpful_yes', true );
$no  = (int) get_post_meta( $page_id, '_wbmw_helpful_no', true );

// Get helpfulness ratio
$total = $yes + $no;
$ratio = $total > 0 ? round( ( $yes / $total ) * 100 ) : 0;

Or query via WP_Query to find your least helpful pages:

$pages = get_posts( array(
    'post_type'      => 'wiki_page',
    'posts_per_page' => 10,
    'meta_key'       => '_wbmw_helpful_no',
    'orderby'        => 'meta_value_num',
    'order'          => 'DESC',
) );

Resetting Votes

To reset the vote count on a specific page, delete its post meta:

delete_post_meta( $page_id, '_wbmw_helpful_yes' );
delete_post_meta( $page_id, '_wbmw_helpful_no' );

Frequently Asked Questions

Can users change their vote after submitting? No. Votes are final once submitted. The widget shows only the Yes/No buttons until voted; after voting, the updated count is displayed.

Are guest votes reliable? Guest votes are limited per browser session. They are less reliable than logged-in user votes since the same visitor could clear their cookies and vote again. For community wikis where most readers are logged-in members, this is generally not an issue.

Can I turn the rating widget off? Yes, site-wide. Uncheck Enable Helpfulness Rating in WB Plugins > Member Wiki > Display. There is no built-in per-page toggle; to hide it on selected pages, override the widget template (below) and add your own condition.

Can I change the button labels or emoji? The widget markup is rendered inline near the end of the single page template, templates/wiki-page.php (gated by the Enable Helpfulness Rating setting). Override that template in your theme at your-theme/wb-member-wiki/wiki-page.php to change the question text, button labels, or markup.

Where do I see which pages are underperforming? There’s no built-in report, but you can use the code example above to query pages with the most “No” votes. Pages with high negative ratings are good candidates for content review and improvement.