Steam and Bethesda remove paid modding from Skyrim Workshop

Well...wow.

Valve and Bethesda have announced that they have removed the payment feature from Steam Workshop effective immediately. Refunds have been sent out to anyone who paid for a mod using the system.

Bethesda's blog piece originally defended the system and was then later updated. However, I think it's an amazingly good read. You may not agree with everything written within it, but it is well written and shares key insights in to Bethesda's thinking whe...

Steam Service Providers, and some how needing to clarify the Nexus stance again

I'm going to preface this news post by telling you to read the entire article, to the bottom before you run off and start quoting things left right and centre out of context. With that said...

Yesterday, Steam's new Paid Workshop had its first casualty as Chesko pulled his mods off the site. He made a post on Reddit explaining his decision, and took a pop at the Nexus at the bottom by saying:

I am also considering removing my content from the Nexus. Why? The pro...

Quick updates to the site, money money money edition

Before I get in to the minor updates we've made to the site in light of the major news yesterday I will quickly address the matter of our forums being slow and/or down.

Obviously this news has been a huge deal, and probably exploded far more than Valve and Bethesda realised it would (and not particularly positively, lets face it!). Some of the spotlight has been shined on the Nexus as a result of that. Some people have expressed concern we'll go the same way (they obviou...

Valve/Bethesda announce paid modding for Skyrim, more games to follow

Hey look, one of my predictions came true!

Valve and Bethesda announced today that they've updated the Skyrim Workshop to enable mod authors to upload mods to the site which can then be placed behind a paywall, requiring users to pay a set amount (or an author-set minimum, with the option to pay more if you so wish) before they can download the mod in question. I'm not sure there's been an official announcement about the revenue split, but as there's no new infor...

BLOG PIECE: Modding as a hobby versus modding as a career, and the position of the Nexus

Ever since Valve announced their curated Workshops update for Steam Workshop back at the end of January and Bethesda announced an update to their Skyrim Workshop to remove the 100MB file size limit I've been meaning to write one of my long-winded, often nonsensical blog pieces that goes off on extreme tangents rife with radical speculation. It's been quite a while since I've done one of these, so excuse me if I'm rusty.

I'm going to begin by clarifying that I sti...

New paid full-time community manager and development lead job role open for applications

Just a quick update to let you all know that we've added a new full-time paid position to the site that's immediately available to be filled. We are looking for a dedicated community manager and development lead who will become a public facing ambassador for the sites both domestically, on the Nexus, and abroad, within official game communities. Improving the community for those of us already here while helping to spread the word about the Nexus to other (official) game communities.

Author blocking, user area tweaks and general updates

A quick update today to let you know about a few new features we've added to the sites over the past few weeks.

Author blocking

First up we've implemented the ability to block user's files, images and videos from showing on the site at all for you, much like how our tag blocking system works. If you block an author you will no longer see any new files, images or videos they add on the site whether it's in the hot files, file searches or otherwise.
...

Bethesda's first-ever E3 conference!

For the first time ever, Bethesda will be hosting an E3 showcase! June 14th is the date to plot into your calendar.

They will be sharing details on how to register in the coming months, so keep an eye out for any news on BethBlog.

And should you not be able to attend E3, they will also be streaming the entire showcase on Twitch (http://www.twitch.tv/bethesda). Remember to tune in on the 14th of June!...

Latest site updates

We've made lots of updates to the sites recently. Because quite a few of the changes we make these days are subtle, rather than obvious, here's a run-down.


Notifications

This is the least subtle of the changes we've made recently. We've completely revamped the notifications system on the sites to be much more powerful and useful, especially for mod authors. Notifications are still located in the top bar of the site. If you have notifications you w...

NMM 0.60 Alpha release with profiling, ready for testing

It's been a year in the making but we're finally ready to release what we think will be our final build for the next major step in NMM functionality, profiling. The download link for this build is at the bottom of this article, however, before you rush off, I highly recommend you read this article as it contains important information about this version of NMM.


What is profiling?

Profiling is the ability to create and switch between multiple different mod ...

NMM 0.53 release and fixes

We released NMM version 0.53.0 at the beginning of the week which includes a new mod activation queue window. The idea is to allow you to queue up multiple installations or uninstallations of your mods as well as not locking out the other functions of NMM while your mod actions are being processed.

This update also enables you to select multiple mods and decide whether to install them or uninstall them, potentially saving a lot of clicking if you're doing a fresh install of hund...

The Nexus State of the Union - 2015

As far as I'm concerned I'm dubbing 2014 "The Year of Stability and Sleep" for the Nexus. The first year where we finally grappled with and beat the recurring downtime issues that have plagued the site ever since its inception back in 2001, and, once we finally stabilised our new cloud and cluster setup around about the middle of the year, myself and the staff have had practically 5 months of uninterrupted sleep. No more text messages or phone calls at 3am telling us the sites ar...

Slow download speeds? Please use our Download Speed Diagnoser

Back in August we moved to a new CDN server setup for serving our downloads. For many, download speeds have stayed the same or improved with this move but for some, download speeds have gotten worse.

We're continuing to work on the download setup within the CDN as we continue to learn all the little intricacies involved in such a complex setup but we're struggling to troubleshoot a lot of people's download speed issues, a lot of the time, because we're not getting th...

August holidays, Fileserver to CDN switchover and WYSIWYG editor for descriptions

Hello, and let me start by apologising for the lack of updates recently. August is typically our holiday month where most of us take at least a week or two off (or 4, in my case) to have our holidays, rest and recuperate away from the sites. I'll doubly apologise to those people who've sent in support tickets via the contact form. As I am the sole point of contact for support tickets if I'm not around they go unanswered, and a lot have gone unanswered this month (though I've trie...

Downloading issues update

Following on from an update on the downloading situation made at the start of the month I want to write a quick post to say we're still working on the CDN setup I touted in the original update.

Many people are (wrongly) blaming the new download system we added to the site back in the middle of June, which worked fine up until the Steam sales made everything go a bit crazy. To enable us to fully discount this update as a factor for those of you who are getting slow downloads and ...

Virus scan reports now visible on file pages, more security incoming

After recent events by a malicious user to upload viruses to the Nexus sites and gain access to Nexus accounts (for reasons completely unknown to us as your accounts are worth very little in tangible terms!) we've been stepping up our public-facing security options.

Thanks to the great support of VirusTotal, who have given us very generous access to their virus API for free, we've been able to integrate their virus scanning functionality into the Nexus file pages. VirusT...

Steam sale and downloading issues prompts CDN expansion

Over the past 10 days we've had widespread reports of downloading issues on the sites that has gone hand-in-hand with the annual Steam summer sale promotion that sees games getting massively discounted on Valve's gaming platform. These downloading issues were caused, simply put, by the fact every single one of our 20 download servers was filled to capacity with people trying to download.

If our registration statistics are anything to go by this year's summer sale was the...

Site updates: stability, premium donations, endorsements, downloading, apostrophes and full-stops

It's been a while since I last wrote about the updates we've made on the sites, of which there have been quite a few, just some have been quite subtle. For my part I've been extremely busy over the past few months (here, have a picture of my feet dangling over the edge of the grand canyon) in between trips to the US and moving home. Thankfully the Nexus to-do list is neverending so the other staff have had more than enough to keep themselves busy. As there's so much I'll just...

Another note on site security, your security, and a malware email doing the rounds

Recently we've been the target of some attacks on the site that date back to March of this year. To begin with a user was uploading a virus to the sites masquerading as other popular files. The virus was being used to gain infected user's stored usernames and passwords for the site which were then being used to login to their Nexus accounts here and continue to upload more viruses. That stopped. Now recently we had a high profile breach of one of our staff accounts that allowed a user to...

Staff account compromise. What's happened and an apology.

Back in March you might remember a news post written by myself titled Be Careful: Trojans masquerading as popular executables. To cut a long story short, a user was uploading a malicious file to the site that, when installed, would enable the user to find out your Nexus username and password, which was then in turn used to log in to other user's accounts with the stolen login information and continue to upload the same virus to the sites. Today we were alerted to a malicious change to SkyUI, ...