Since the launch of the new TSM website, we’ve had a lot of feedback about the missing directory of publicly shared group imports.
While it’s easier than ever to make your own groups in-game by searching the Base Group, or using Wowhead to leverage more powerful filters – we wanted to improve the way you find and use community-made groups on the web. It wasn’t quite ready for the recent relaunch of the overall website but we’re excited to announce that it’s back and the first iteration is ready to use!
As was the case with the old TSM website, the ability to search for and use these groups will remain free and does not require a TSM Premium plan.
You can access groups by using the global search bar or via the Groups menu option in the navigation bar. When opening the page you’ll see a list of popular groups, groups you have looked at recently, and a link to view all of the groups shared for the game version selected. The page is always pre-filtered based on the game version you have selected in the top right of the page, so you won’t see Classic Era groups mixed in with Retail groups for example.
If you search for a particular item in the global search bar or on the Groups main Browse page, you’ll see published groups in the results along side the item itself. This is very handy to find groups you might be interested in using based on the item you want to group.
The first major evolution to the system is that they can also include operations associated with the group. This is possible because the way groups are published is based on what a TSM user uses in-game, rather than collecting some item IDs from Wowhead which was the only option on the old website.
If you’d like to use a group you can click on the Add to Addon button to generate an import string to be copy and pasted in-game.
Publishing Groups
There are two ways to publish a group on the TSM website.
Clicking on the My Published Groups sub-menu item will show a list of currently published groups. From here you can click on Import From String and copy and paste the import string that can be manually exported from any group in-game. Learn how to export a group from the TSM knowledgebase.
Alternatively, if you are a TSM Premium (Gold) subscriber, all of your groups are synced to the website automatically so you can publish them from directly from the My Addon Groups tab after selecting the appropriate WoW Account and TSM Profile.
Once published, you’ll get a shareable link you can provide your friends or community and the group will appear in the public directory. You can however opt to make the group ‘private’ so only those with a link can access the group if you’d prefer not to have the group included in the public directory.
Future Improvements
We have a lot of other ideas to improve the process of finding and managing groups on the TSM website including showcasing published groups that contain a particular item when you view that item page and introducing a rating system to share feedback.
Additionally, with a TSM Premium plan, we’re exploring options to synchronise a group to the game directly via the TSM desktop app to skip the manual importing process. This could also enable some cool mechanisms such as ‘subscribing’ to a particular published group so you would be able to keep up to date with any changes or updates without having to think about it.
We’d love to hear your feedback on how you used the old version of the public TSM groups feature, what you like or dislike about the newly revamped version, and what you want to see out of it in the future!