Search site:
 
 
 

RSS feed TrueAchievements News

Mar
12
Digital Cowboys podcast on TrueAchievements.com
This week I was invited to be a guest on the highly regarded Digital Cowboys podcast. They were planning a show about achievements and trophies, and they thought that a representative from TA might be an interesting person to guest on the show.

After some mild trepidation, I agreed to break my podcasting virginity and appear on the show.

I was incredibly nervous - if you've never heard of the Digital Cowboys I should say that these guys have been podcasting for years, and their show is up there amongst the most interesting and professional of all the podcasts I have listened to.

In fact, they are one of the few gaming podcasts that I continue to listen to every week.

So, if you are interested in hearing the interview (there's a lot of discussion about our site and our members as well as more general achievement-related chat), you can download it from iTunes by searching for "Digital Cowboys", or by clicking this link:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcas...

or direct from here:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/digitalcowboys/Digital_Co....mp3

I hope you enjoy it, as I say, this is the first time I've ever done anything like this so please be gentle with your comments!

Also, it's not too late to support the charity 24-hour gaming marathon that the Cowboys undertook last week in which they won an amazing 7,510 GamerScore (8,644 TA!).

The idea was to raise money for the Haiti earthquake tragedy, and if you want to support this fantastic cause then you can donate here:

http://www.justgiving.com/Digital-Cowboys-Haiti-Relief-Chall...

Their target is 2k and I think we can help them to Truly Achieve that (sorry!).

Come on guys, let's do this!

Thanks all, have a cracking weekend, and enjoy the podcast

Rich
Added by TrueAchievement at 22:26:32 | There are 66 comments
Mar
08
A Host of New Features
A resonably large update this week, with quite a few new features:

Achievement TA Score Changes

On each Achievement panel you will now see a number that represents the recent change in TA Score for that achievement.

It looks at the largest change over the last 1 day, 2 days, 1 week and 2 weeks and displays that value. Hovering over the number will give you more detail, and clicking it will take you through the TA Score change graph for that achievement.


Stats Page modifications

As requested, I have added an additional tab for "best days". This shows your best days for winning achievements, TA score and gamerscore.

Offline achievements don't count, and the Achievement TA Scores are as they are now rather than at the time they were won (it would be incredibly slow to do this). Clicking on the day will take you through to view the particular achievements you won on that day.

I've also added your friends list to the stats page, and clicking on any of your friends will show you the exact same stats tab for their data.


My Achievements

I have added all of the new achievement flag types to the filter on the My Achievements page. I have also linked this page from every gamer page where it says "gamer x has won y achievements".


Send TA Invites

You can now send customized TA invites to your friends. These will have an embedded link that will automatically add you as their referrer when they sign up. You can find this from the Useful Links menu.


PM blocking


You can now block users from being able to send you a private message (note: you cannot block mods or admins). To do this, simply go to one of their messages in your inbox and click the new Block Gamer button in the header. You can unblock them in teh same way.


Recent votes on Solutions

On your Solution List is a new column (Wk +/i) - this shows any votes on those solutions in the last week.


Welcome Banner

In order to give a bit more information to potential new gamers, we have created some welcome banners. If you log out and go to either the homepage or an achievement page you can see this banner in action! It consists of 5 rotating slides that give some examples of what we can offer here at TA.

Special thanks to lozzy7 for his help with this one!

Enjoy!
Added by TrueAchievement at 11:11:20 | There are 73 comments
Feb
23
Customize Your Homepage
A request I've had outstanding since way back in the day is for a way to re-order and have more control over the panels on the right side of the homepage.

It wasn't been a particularly easy problem to solve, so I left it for a (long) while.

This weekend I had a bit of a brainwave as to how it could work, and lo and behold I cracked it!

So, you now have a new page linked from the Customize menu - Customize Homepage

From here you can choose the header colour of the all the panels, select Hidden to hide them, and, best of all, drag and drop them around to change their order. Enjoy!

I would also like to mention the amazing work the content team has done in creating a whole load of new achievement icons. You can find details of the new flags from the Useful Links menu.

Thanks all!
Added by TrueAchievement at 08:40:24 | There are 76 comments
Feb
12
Gaming Session Feedback
Hey all

Since I wrote the Gaming Session code a few months ago, they have become incredibly popular with over 5000 sessions created.

However, there's been no way previously to offer feedback on the other guys that showed (or more importantly didn't show) up.

After some considerable thought on how this feedback system should work, I've now implemented the code.

On the reminder email that you receive before the session is an additional link to give feedback.

This can only be done if the session has finished.

You can provide some notes for the other guys in the session to read about why you didn't show or were late.

And you can also give notes on the other games and rate them on a good/bad/indifferent scale.

I will add some additional links to this page so that you can get there from the gaming session page itself tomorrow.

I will also add a way to view someone's average feedback score tomorrow, but if you guys could start providing feedback from now on it will give me some data to play with.

[b}Database Purge

I have begun a clean up of the database. Any user that we have been unable to scan for more than 6 months is in the process of being removed. This has resulted in some TA Ratio's dropping a bit, so your score may have dropped a bit. It's for the good of the system as a whole though, as most of these gamers have changed tags and re-registered so we were effectively counting them twice.

By the time it's finished, we will have removed 5000 gamers.

I will automate the process every week from now on so it will be less dramatic!

Thanks all!
Added by TrueAchievement at 09:14:29 | There are 140 comments
Jan
18
A Few New Features
Hey good people of TA!

Trophy Case

Something I have often been asked is "Why can't we put completed games in our Trophy Case?". When I originally wrote the trophy case functionality, I hadn't considered this as a possibility, so the trophy case was heavilly tied to the achievement table which made this change very difficult.

Over the weekend I completely changed the way the trophy case works - which means you can now add those completed games in there!

You need to go the game page (or any page where the game header is displayed) and you'll find a new Add to Trophy Case button under the game pic if you have completed it, and if your trophy case isn't already full.

You can also now view other people's trophy case in full by clicking on the new View button in the top right of the panel on their home page.

New Threads

Another hotly requested feature was a\ way to view New Threads since your last visit. While I haven't quite nailed the since last visit part, you can now choose all new Threads or new Posts from any point in time from the new Forums->New Threads page.

Twitter Link

You can now keep up to date with all things TA by following the TA twitter feed on:

http://twitter.com/trueachievement

Game TA Ratios

Game TA Ratios are now viewable on My Games and Games List pages - you can also choose whether to show the game's full TA Ratio in the My Games list or your own TA Ratio for that game in My Settings

Solutions Guide

Our Content Team, now led by Van Uden, have put together a formal set of rules for writing solutions for the site, you can find a link to these guidelines in your Useful Links tab, and they are also linked from the achievement pages when adding a guide.

Enjoy!
Added by TrueAchievement at 08:49:25 | There are 92 comments