ICYMI: Every TA Community Month new feature so far

By Luke Albigés,

Yesterday, we crossed the halfway point of our Community Month, which sees the mad lads on the TA dev team delivering a new site feature every day in March. With two weeks left, let's take a look at the improvements so far!

We've been sending out site notifications for some of the bigger additions and changes, so it's unlikely that you'll have missed many of those, but there could be a few smaller features or quality-of-life improvements that the dev team has added which you didn't spot. Here's what we've had so far, and remember, there's still a bunch more to come. Those upcoming features are all now locked in and the team is busy making sure everything works as intended ready for the next two weeks, but don't let that stop you swinging by the Site Wishlist Forum or TrueAchievements Discord server to share any requests or ideas you may have for new site functions — once they've had a chance to recover from this March madness, our dev guys will need more features and fixes to keep them busy, after all!

March 1st: We introduced Targets, a new set of monthly challenges with bronze, silver, and gold medals up for grabs based on your performance in each. March's Targets involve earning Gamerscore in RPGs, unlocking daily achievements, and racking up completions... how are you getting on so far?

March 2nd: Our second new feature was host migration for Gaming Sessions — something a lot of people had been asking for, and which should help make running sessions with other members that little bit smoother.

March 3rd: Next, we added additional formatting options for achievement guides, helping writers make them more concise and easier to follow with things like lists, bullet points, and headers. Folks have already started putting these to good use, which is awesome to see!

March 4th: We turned our attention to data readability on game pages with new and reworked panels for games with DLC, breaking down stats by base game only, all DLC, or each individual pack — very handy for games which have had a lot of updates and could otherwise be hard to follow.

March 5th: With Window Phone achievement unlocks skyrocketing as the platform's discontinuation in May draws closer, we decided to bring back the Windows Phone leaderboards (as well as the GFWL ones) for one final hurrah.

March 6th: Up next came the introduction of Gamer Notes, a new private memo system with which you can make notes on other TA users via either their profiles or session pages to better keep track of members who you have played with in the past.

March 7th: Competition heated up on day seven as we brought in three weekly leaderboards for Gamerscore, TrueAchievement score, and TA Difference. Post some big numbers and see how high you can climb!

March 8th: This update was the first exclusively for TA Pro members, allowing them to export a list of all their locked achievements for their own off-site number crunching and bookkeeping. Or, as several bright sparks suggested, printing out lists of unobtainables to burn.

As a bonus, today was the day we actually passed the 750,000 registered users milestone — you know, the whole reason the dev team decided to work themselves to the bone with daily updates for a whole month? The crazy fools... still, they're absolutely smashing it, as I'm sure you'll agree.

March 9th: For those who like to shout about their achievements from the virtual rooftops on their social media platform of choice, we added the ability to share custom achievement unlock images. All you need to do is copy and paste the url and the site does the rest of the work! Great stuff.

March 10th: Due to popular demand, we decided to extend the new formatting options added to guides earlier in the month to another area of the site, with extra formatting tools for blog posts. Hopefully that should keep the bloggers happy...

March 11th: Today's update was to our game product pages, with a full rework of price pages (following a soft launch a little while ago that some may have spotted), adding a price history graph and the ability to add games to your collection from this page.

March 12th: We made a neat quality-of-life change, showing game install sizes and completion estimates right in your Game Collection page, so you should have even more data at your fingertips. Remember: always wash your hands before and after handling raw data.

March 13th: As the news team grows, TA is publishing more and more content all the time. To help our users keep track of the games they love, we added the ability to follow specific games and topics from each article and get alerts when a new story goes live — you never have to miss a news beat again!

March 14th: We thought we'd go for a one-two punch, expanding on the previous day's option to follow specific news topics by offering users their very own personal news feeds, based on their followed games, series, topics, and authors.

March 15th: Another minor but very useful quality-of-life improvement today, as we added new achievement filters to lists, allowing you to filter out, say, unmissable story achievements in order to get a better idea of what you actually need to do in any given game besides beat it.

March 16th: We made another little tweak that makes a big difference for some users, adding DLC separators to achievement lists to make them more readable and logical in List View. Again, this will be extra useful for games with stacks of additional content... like the scores of Dead by Daylight achievements added across its 35 add-ons and counting.

March 17th: And we're all caught up to today, introducing a second set of shareable images. This time, though, we added personalised game progress images that can be shared far and wide. Proud of a completion? Got most achievements in a tough game in a few hours? Now you can run off a shiny little badge to prove it and show off to your friends!

We'll be back tomorrow with yet another neat new feature for you to enjoy. In the meantime, we'd love to hear your thoughts on Community Month so far — your favourite additions and updates, feedback on any of the above, things you're hoping to see in the next few weeks, and so on. Get involved below and you could help shape the continued improvement of the greatest Xbox site out there!

Site Feature News Round-up

Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.