TrueAchievements Site News

Hi everyone

As most of you know, the TA database is enormous. With the number of awesome gamers registered on TA, we have a lot of game and achievement data.

At the time of writing, we have over 408 million achievement records. That data has to be searched every time we show you your achievement lists in each game, and also whenever we recalculate the site's statistics.

To make that job faster, the data has some indexes on it. As more data is added, these indexes gradually get more fragmented and eventually become so broken that they are useless. That has a knock on effect - the site is slower to load, the scanners are slower to run, and the site recalculations take longer.

So we need to carry out some regular rebuilding of these indexes. Unfortunately, when we do this it's not advisable to put additional data into the tables that are being re-indexed. So, during this period, the scanners will be paused.

As I recently added some code to give you some feedback when you request a scan, you will now be able to see if they are paused when you do this, along with a link to a little more information,

The first maintenance period will be tomorrow (Thursday) at around this time (3pm BST). It may take a couple of hours, and during this time the scanners will be paused. The rest of the site should function as normal.

Hopefully, when the maintenance is finished, you should notice the site will be a bit faster.

I intend to make this a regular thing, so assuming all goes well tomorrow it will be on the 3rd Thursday of every month.

So, a little short term pain, but hopefully some long term gain!



Rich

Friends, Romans, Achievement Junkies, lend us your ears!

On the heels of our wildly successful first podcast, the team of Dog of Thunder, Matrarch, TrueAchievement, and me, osubluejacket, are back with this month's TA Podcast!

In this podcast we delve into the news about the "NextBox" and Microsoft's upcoming announcement and the rest of the hot news on TA. Dog digs into the last remains of THQ and their new overlords. We also commiserate and have a collective airing of grievances over our "Game of the Month" (Star Trek), talk about new game announcements, and hit Rich with this month's Achievement Challenge.

There's also a hot rumor that we've got a giveaway for a special listener. That's all I'm going to tease.

As a general reminder, we're always looking for achievement challenges for the crew, questions from the community, and other ideas that you'd like to see us discuss. If you have challenges, questions, or ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments or send me a message!

If you're a cool kid and like the podcast (or not a cool kid and still like the podcast), be sure to subscribe on iTunes below and give us a good rating!

Hey TA’ers!

It's been some time since we had our last recruitment drive, so it pleases me to inform you we are now accepting applications for most teams.

Moderation
The TA Moderation Team is responsible for the smooth running of the forum, friend feed, blogs, comments, feedback and the chat room. They have the ability to edit or delete any user content that breaks site rules and if necessary apply restrictions to accounts. They also deal with the contact us queries. If you're interested in joining the Moderation team, send the linked application to Clever Jake.

Investigations
The TA Investigation Team is in charge of keeping cheated tags out of the TA leaderboards. They use a variety of tools (like NonStat tracking, Gamerscore tracking and Game Removal) to do this. Membership is kept secret to avoid public harassment. You won't get any real public recognition for being on this team, but you do get access to the secret IT lair.
The team needs people who work well with others, can keep secrets, have a high attention to detail, and a decent amount of time to burn. If you're interested in joining the Investigation team, send the linked application to the Investigation Manager

Newshounds
The Newshounds primarily write news, this is the majority of the content that hits TAs front page. They are also responsible for running contests, conducting interviews, writing reviews, and other odds and ends (and some new and exciting things coming up in the future!). Right now they are looking for writers to help them get through their daily news queue. If you're interested in joining the Newshound team, send the linked application to Matrarch

Walkthroughs
A walkthrough overseer’s role is to assist walkthrough writers with their walkthroughs. This includes everything from correcting spelling and grammar to adjusting the presentation and format of the walkthrough. Upon completion of a walkthrough by the writer, the overseer will check through the above, as well as copyright infringements, and inform the managers that the walkthrough is ready to be published. This ensures that the walkthroughs on TrueAchievements are of the highest quality possible. If you're interested in joining the Walkthrough team, send the linked application to Ergo Me Smart

Game Information
Over at Game Info HQ, the team was recently split into 3 smaller teams in order to focus better on all the things the team does. Each of those teams has a manager and specific game info responsibilities. Chad and Jessie is in charge of the New Achievements team, LitaOsiris runs the Submissions team, and Epsilon Theta is the head honcho for the Pre-Release team. As a new recruit, you'll learn each section of game info and then pick which team you'd like to join. While your main responsibility will be to that team, all of our members are encouraged to contribute to the other 2 teams as well.

The work is very important, but can prove to be repetitive at times. Being able to work well with others and communicating effectively are the two most important qualities for a member of this team. If you're interested in joining the Game Info team, send the linked application to W1LLYMAN

I would like to also wish good luck to those applying, ALL roles are really important to the site so get those applications in soon.

Thanks,

Clever Jake

Ola TA'ers!

I have just added an additional tab to game pages that shows any DLC packs they may have, and the tab itself shows the number of DLC packs in brackets.

If there is a single DLC pack for a game, you'll be taken immediately to that pack. If there are multiple packs, you'll see them all listed.

When viewing a single pack, you'll now see your friends' scores in that pack, as well as the achievement distribution graph for it.

If you own the pack, you'll also see a summary of your score in the pack, when you started it, and a pretty completion indicator too

You can also now add DLC packs to your wishlist!

Have a great weekend

Hi all

As you have probably noticed, the TA Ratio for every achievement has been reset to 1.0.

This was a bug I inadvertently introduced yesterday when I increased the size of the Game Name field (I know, right?).

I'm re-running the site calculation routines now and the scores should be back to normal within 4 hours from now (unfortunately that's how long it takes to crunch the numbers).

I've paused the scanners in the mean time so as not to trigger any incorrect milestones (I'll remove any that have triggered as a result of this).

I'll post an update on here as soon as the scores are back to normal.

Apologies for this one, it was a bit of an unforeseen one!

Rich
(TA)

P.S. Who remembers when I used to do drunken late night site coding and stuff like this would happen on a regular basis?

Hi everyone

I have often thought it would be useful to be able to store notes on particular games - maybe how you are doing on a particular achievement in the game, or that you want to pick it up when it goes on discount etc.

I've now added a way for you to be able to do this - under the Game button dropdown on all Game pages, you should now see an Add notes option.

This brings up an area for you to enter any notes you want to on the game. Click on the Save button, and the notes will appear at the top right on that game's page, and on all achievement pages for that game as well.

You can edit the notes by clicking the edit icon on the Notes panel, or by clicking the Game button and selecting the Edit notes option.

You can also clear the notes by deleting them and clicking save.

Have a great weekend!

Last week, our attractive, articulate, and all-around nice guy Editorial Manager (two out of three ain't bad, right?) teased that we were "working on some exciting new projects". Many community members might have just thought this to be an off-the-cuff tease to some amorphous project in the far-distant future.

Boy, were they wrong.

We are excited to announce the inaugural TrueAchievements Podcast!

Our podcast will be hosted by yours truly and joined by the elite team of Dog of Thunder, Matrarch, and the man you all want to hear, TrueAchievement.

Each month we're going to be discussing all of the top news on the site, the best games of the month and/or the games that we're playing, the hottest achievement and community news, as well as taking questions from you and grinding through our monthly achievement challenge. The best news is this is just the beginning. Since this is just the first episode, we're open to community suggestions. Is there a feature or segment you'd like to hear us discuss? Do you want to hear Dog and I fight over games more (or less)? Would you like to challenge Rich to play some Kinect games while changing his baby daughter's diaper? Do you want to know what kind of snacks Matrarch provides when she hosts couch co-op sessions? Seriously, we're open to suggestions!

We hope you enjoy the first episode and please, don't hesitate to post questions and/or achievement challenges for us in the comments thread or send them to me in a message.

Please note: We are currently awaiting approval from iTunes to go into the store. In the mean time, you can listen to the show in the embedded player below, or subscribe to the following RSS feed in your podcast player of choice: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TrueAchievements

Something that's often been requested in the Site Wishlist Forum is the ability to rate a game with more than just 5 options.

Today we went live with a half point ratings system which finally makes that possible!

Our aggregate ratings show up in Google search results so it's well worth making your opinions known - when I was writing the new code I noticed that we've had well over 2.5 million ratings, which is pretty cool!

The new system should be pretty self explanatory, but please post any questions you may have under this story.

You can of course go back and adjust the scores on your previously rated games should you wish to do so.



Redesign update

Thanks to everyone that reported bugs with the redesign in here - most of the initial bugs are now sorted, and I also took on board some feedback and made some additional changes.

There are still some issues with the Menus on certain versions of Android, so if you are experiencing them please could you post your set up in this thread and I'll do my best to get them fixed.

For those of you that are really really missing the GamerCard that used to permanently sit on the right of the page and allow you one click access to force an update, you can unhide it from this page.

I would like to thank everyone that has given positive feedback (and helpful critical feedback) on the redesign - it's been a considerable amount of hard work and to read the comments has shown me that it was all worth it.

Have a great weekend!