Posting reputation: let the community moderate itself

I have added a new reputation system to file and image comments on all the Nexus sites. This new system is a "plus or minus" system similar to the current rating system except that minus points can actually have consequences to the post. It is visible on all file and image comments to the right of the comment date. If you like a post you plus rep it by clicking the thumbs up icon and the post will instantly gain a reputation point. If you don't like the post, if you think it's a troll post o...

New Supporter member group and Image Share section

After reading through the feedback provided by the community on my last news post I decided to return to the confines of the private Nexus staff forums to listen to the council of my fellow staff members and discuss viable solutions. Today I've decided to go ahead with my plans and we'll see how it goes. To start with I have created a new paid for member group known as a "Supporter". Supporters are either people who have paid a one-off fee of £1 to become a Supporter of the site or are past ...

Announcing Adult Nexus in development

I'd like to take this time to announce some new spin-offs to the Nexus sites labeled Adult TESNexus, Adult Fallout 3 Nexus and Adult Dragon Age Nexus that are currently being developed. While these sites are not finished I'm announcing them now to gauge community response and receive feedback on what possible users would like to see from the sites. While I can't fulfill all requests I always learn a lot and get lots of great ideas for future site features from these sorts of feedback sessions. ...

Terms of Service update for the sites and forum

The Terms of Service for all Nexus sites and the forums have been updated today with some important changes to rules on file and image uploads and general etiquette. A new section has been added on Uploading files and images (click to go straight to the relevant area) that clearly sets out in writing what we do and don't allow on the Nexus sites. Many of these rules have been enforced for years but they've never been properly set out in the Terms of Service, making things slightly "grey" for ...

Download speeds question for US members

I would be interested to know what sort of download speeds US members are getting on the file server nearest to their location. Obviously normal members are capped at a maximum of 500kb/sec but I'd like to know how close people are getting to this figure in contrast to their actual download speed and their location. If you'd like to share this information please let me know as it would help me better understand the needs of you all. Please provide your general location (the State you are livi...

New EU file server now available

There is now a new 100mbit file server available to all members located in Maidenhead, England. Obviously this server will benefit the European visitors of the Nexus sites and I will be closely monitoring the bandwidth throughout the day to insure the server isn't being saturated. The file servers are being reshuffled and this is the last month that the two Washington file servers in the US will be operational. Both the Dallas and Seattle servers have been upgraded to Gigabit lines and while ...

Corrupt images and missing thumbnails

If you're a regular browser or user of the file database or image share section you'll notice that some images do not have a preview thumbnail accompanying them. This is due to the rather unique way the built-in screenshot creator for Dragon Age works; it essentially adds lots of miscellaneous and useless data to the start of the image file that breaks the thumbnail generator on the site. I have created an article on the reasons for this problem and the ways you can fix this issue when upload...

Changes to the "Updates today" page

I have made both aesthetic and functional changes to the "Updates today" page on all Nexus sites this evening. Aesthetically each row of content has been given a slightly different background colour so you can more easily line up the content (such as the edits made and time the edit was made) for each file name. A new function has been added above the usual "Edited files" block that allows you to filter the list of edited files based on the edits made. This is handy as you can now simply l...

Aesthetic changes to file pages

The file database on all Nexus sites has been updated with a new aethsetic look and rearranging in both categories and file entries. The image gallery now works in a similar way to the "Hot files" box, showing images that the owner of the file has uploaded (and not images by other users)....

GameStop added as affiliate

GameStop has now been added to the list of affiliates available to purchase from in our affiliate store. GameStop are one of the largest video game retailers in the US so if you're planning to buy any games in the near future, or pre-order Fallout: New Vegas, for example, then you might like to do it through them. A big thank you to the people who have been using the affiliate links to buy items online and a reminder, as I get asked this a lot, that you don't need to just use the links for bu...

Front page changes

The front page on all three Nexus sites has been updated and completely reworked to better suit file sites such as these. The site news has been moved below the new content blocks and the webmaster's blog will be relocated in due course. For those wondering how hot files are chosen; the top 5 files are picked once per day from the top 25 recently endorsed files of the past 21 days. Adult only files are not included in the mix and (obviously) only files with images are accepted. If you're a fi...

Affiliate store launched

A little over a week ago I asked people on the site where they bought their video games and hardware from online. The aim was to create an affiliate store of the most popular gaming and hardware outlets in the States and Europe for people to buy products from via the Nexus sites. The point of this is very simple; buying products from the selected affiliates on the site provides the Nexus sites with a small but valuable commision on all the goods you buy. Do you buy your games from Amazon? Gre...

Vote for Bethesda at The Escapist

Each year The Escapist (best known for their weekly "Zero Punctuation" column) run a people's choice competition of the biggest game developers in the world. Members of the site vote for their favourite developers in "rounds" against other developers and in the latest round Bethesda have come up against Valve, creators of all those games you love to hate (and I guess enjoy). If you'd like to help Bethesda out in a match-up they're clearly underdogs for then head on over to the voting page and...

Most endorsed recently added files

There is now a new Top 25 page available on all Nexus sites in the top lists that displays the most endorsed files that have been recently added to the site. You can filter the results from between 1 day and 60 days since the addition of the file. You can use this tool to check out the up-and-coming new files on the site and it can be found under Top 100 -> Most endorsed recently added files....

Where do you buy your games and hardware?

Many major online retailers have an affiliate system linked to them by which they offer small percentage based commissions to sites that refers paying customers to them. Take for example a site like Amazon. If you click a link on someone's website to Amazon and then proceed to buy something off the site the referring website will be given a small percentage of the total sale in commission. You don't pay extra. You don't do anything differently. You don't even know you've done it. But a commissio...

Tracking centre changes

The tracking centre on all Nexus sites has been updated with new functionality and some fixes. Here's the change log: Added a new filter option to set a time range for results Fixed an issue with results not being ordered by date when filters were set Removed the ability to order results by file name as this functionality is practically provided by the individual feeds anyway Fixed an issue with text overlapping on small resolutions Please give the new tracking centre a spin. See wh...

Network upgrade complete

All the Nexus sites and the forums were brought down today from 1pm to 9pm GMT so that I could upgrade all the sites to their latest versions. The upgrades went down without a hitch and there were no unforeseen problems during the upgrade process. However there could be plenty of unforeseen problems with the new site code that my own personal testing hasn't picked up. The scope of testing I do as an individual, and as the creator of the site is very limited compared to the scope provided by t...

Scheduled down-time (8 hours) Monday 15th March

All the Nexus Sites and the forums will be taken offline on Monday the 15th of March from 1pm GMT for up to 8 hours while the forum and Nexus code is updated to the latest version. During this time none of the sites will be available and no files will be downloadable. A redirect will be put in place that I'll keep people updated on. Over 3 months work has gone in to recoding the tens of thousands of lines behind the Nexus sites to increase performance, security, fix many bugs and add some new...

Site problems - 5th Feb 2010

Let me apologise for the spate of problems that have occured today from about 4pm GMT onwards. That time honoured favourite of mine, sod's law, exposed its ugly head again as I worked to fix an issue with the forums. Naturally fixing one minor problem produces one much larger problem to deal with. After my supposed fix earlier in the day it turns out that the table indexes on forum posts (including file/image comments) became out of synch causing all sorts of problems; like posts not being ma...

Server move complete

The down-time scheduled for today is now complete and the forums have successfully been moved to a new server of their own. This should help to alleviate the stress on the forum server which was also hosting both Fallout 3 Nexus and Dragon Age Nexus while dealing with requests from TESNexus. The servers will continue to be tweaked throughout the week. The weekends are the busiest times on Nexus sites so next weekend should prove to be interesting. Thank you for your patience during this ti...